News coverage of the Super Tuesday results focused heavily on the dominance of the two frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Several analysts predicted that Hillary Clinton’s wins in seven of the 11 states that voted, as well as American Samoa, would be the beginning of the end for the upstart campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. While it is true that Senator Sanders’ path forward is more difficult following Clinton’s success, it is much too early to count him out.
On paper, Clinton’s lead in delegates appears insurmountable. The delegate totals on the Democratic side are misleading, however. Several hundred are unpledged delegates or so-called “super delegates”—party leaders who vote based on their personal preference rather than the results of primaries or caucuses. Clinton held a similar lead among unpledged delegates in 2008, but that lead evaporated by the convention. If Sanders can close the gap among pledged delegates, the unpledged delegates will follow.
This cuts the delegate totals down to the following: Clinton holds 609 pledged delegate votes to Sanders’ 412. This lead, while still substantial and difficult to overcome, is not prohibitively large, and insufficient to count the Sanders campaign out. Of the 11 Super Tuesday states, Sanders contested five, winning four of the five. An email from the Sanders campaign to supporters touted these victories as a sign of the campaign’s viability, which makes intuitive sense.
FiveThirtyEight set “targets” for the number of pledged delegates each campaign ought to have, and Clinton leads by this benchmark as well. The flaw in this purely big-picture, data-driven approach, however, is that it discounts the political perception of “momentum” and the extent to which success can generate such momentum. Although Clinton gained the upper hand on Super Tuesday, Sanders is expected to win four of the next six states to vote. This will slow the momentum generated last Tuesday and decrease her chances dealing a knockout blow on March 15, another Tuesday, when she could potentially win all five states.
Hillary Clinton did well on Super Tuesday. She did not, however, win the Democratic nomination for president. Sanders is poised to rack up wins between now and March 15, while Clinton is will try to limit the damage between now and then. To wrap up the nomination, she must hope that this second Tuesday is more “super” than the first.
Image Credit: Mattea Mrkusic