What do Sanders’ Seven Straight Wins Add Up To?
TV and other media like to count wins, as if primaries and caucuses were basketball games where one point could determine the National Championship. Of course, with all of the Democratic primaries being proportionally distributed, it is the delegate count that really counts in winning the nomination.
The caucuses are a different and complicated story which hasn’t been fully explained. Somehow Sanders manages to win them with percentages that seem far in excess of his popular vote percentage in primaries. This may be because of the enthusiasm of his supporters to turn out for the events that the caucuses are. In one case that I looked at, the number of voters in the caucus was one eighth of the number that turned out in the last general election.
In the last seven primaries or caucuses, which were won by Sanders, he received 204 delegates. Clinton received 94 delegates. That significantly narrowed Clinton’s lead by 110 pledged delegates.
To date, from http://thegreenpapers.com , in “hard” delegates, Clinton leads Sanders by 1,215 to 937. If we add in the unpledged delegates including Superdelegates to get the “soft” delegate count, Clinton leads Sanders 1,787 to 1,132. In order to win the Democratic nomination, 2,383 delegates are needed. There are still 1,845 delegates available. So in the soft count, Clinton is only 596 delegates short, which is only 32.3% of the remaining delegates.
We look in detail at the Washington caucus as the one with the most delegates, and also a large gap between Sanders and Clinton. We are asking how representative is the caucus system as opposed to a more inclusive primary. It is estimated that about 230,000 participants attended caucus meetings. In the 2012 presidential vote, Obama won over Romney with 1.76 million votes to 1.29 million votes in Washington. (That was a 56% to 41% win for Obama.). The ratio of the caucus attendees to the Democratic voters was 0.23 million / 1.76 million = 13%. That may be how Sanders’ voters’ youth, enthusiasm, and good web organization could motivate them to spend the extra time and effort to attend the caucus meetings and vote for Sanders. Sanders won by the very lopsided 73.27% to Clinton’s 26.73%. The difference represents about 106,000 votes. That is a large amount of people to motivate, and it is to Sanders’ credit that his qualifications, record, campaign speeches and debate performance can create such enthusiasm.
Since there are 101 pledged delegates in Washington, Sanders got 74 and Clinton got 27. There are also 17 Superdelegates, of which 10 have opted for Clinton, leaving 7 available. This is why some press reports say the results are 74 for Sanders and 37 for Clinton.
