Last night’s hard fought narrow victory by Hillary Clinton in Iowa has put her ahead in the race towards being the democratic nominee. In order to win the nomination, a candidate will need a majority of the 3952 pledged delegates at the convention (this assumes that superdelegates will throw their support to the pledged delegate winner). This is the cold hard math that will determine the nominee. In order to help cut through the spin and determine who is leading at a particular point in time, David Wasserman developed a model showing how many delegates each candidate would need from each contest in order to get to 1976 pledged delegates.
Since Iowa is a favorable state to Sen Sanders, based on its demographic composition and the fact that it is a caucus that allows independents to participate, Wasserman’s model calculated that Senator Sanders needed a significant majority of pledged delegates to remain on track to getting to 1976, while Secretary Clinton needed comparatively fewer delegates from Iowa, given her anticipated strength in other states. With her projected 23 — 21 win in the pledged delegates, Secretary Clinton is 10 delegates ahead of where she needs to be at this point, according to Wasserman’s model. As the delegate season progresses, I’ll keep track of this delegate count and the candidates’ position relative to Wasserman’s model. As we learned in 2008, the cold hard math of the delegate race ultimately determines the winner, despite however campaigns may spin individual state results. Next up is New Hampshire on Feb 9, where Sen Sanders needs to get 15 of the 24 pledged delegates available according to Wasserman. With his strong polling in NH, Sanders may do enough to achieve that margin needed next Monday in New Hampshire.
Date |
State/territory |
pledged delegates |
clinton target |
sanders target |
clinton result |
sanders result |
clinton difference |
sanders difference |
feb 1 |
Iowa |
44 |
13 |
31 |
23 |
21 |
+10 |
-10 |
feb 9 |
New Hampshire |
24 |
9 |
15 |
|
|
|
|
TOTALS |
|
68 |
22 |
46 |
23 |
21 |
+10 |
-10 |
Wasserman’s full projections from his model is shown to the right.