Election Referee: Discussion of 2008 U.S. Presidential Election Controversy » Blog Archive » West Virginia Results: Clinton 67% Obama 26%

West Virginia Results: Clinton 67% Obama 26%

Posted by John Publius Jr. on May 14th, 2008 — in Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Blog

Hillary Clinton won an overwhelming victory over Barack Obama in Tuesday’s West Virginia primary. As a result, Clinton picked up 20 pledged delegates while Obama gained 8 delegates. Clinton swept West Virginia, winning every county in the state, which is an unusual feat for the 2008 Democratic nomination race. However, for Clinton, this is “too little, too late”.

West Virginia has been an important swing state in recent presidential elections, even though it represents only five electoral votes. Again, demographics perhaps played the most important role: West Virginia’s population includes many white working-class and older Democratic voters. These demographic groups have been Hillary Clinton’s base. Barack Obama needs to improve his vote totals among these groups to win the general election in November.

Schedule of the five remaining primaries contests (the number of delegates at stake is in parentheses):

May 20th: Kentucky (51) and Oregon (52)
June 1st: Puerto Rico (55)
June 3rd: Montana (16) and South Dakota (15)

Also, we are waiting for approximately 240 super delegates to announce their intentions.

Despite her impressive win in West Virginia, Hillary Clinton’s only feasible (although highly unlikely) chance for the nomination is that the Obama campaign suffers a catastrophic implosion.

Delegate Math Scenarios:
This “delegate calculator” from CNN’s website is a good tool for exploring scenarios. To clinch the nomination, Barack Obama needs to win 33% of the vote in the remaining primaries and also 33% of the remaining super delegates. Conversely, Hillary Clinton needs 72% to win the nomination.

*Delegate Count: Obama needs 141 more delegates to clinch the nomination:

Obama: 1884 (total), 1600 (pledged), 284 (super delegates)

Clinton: 1718 (total), 1445 (pledged), 273 (super delegates)

Edwards: 19 (total), 19 (pledged), 0 (super delegates)

* Updated May 14, 2008, according to CNN.
2,025 delegates required to win the nomination.

Note on delegate counts: each news agency has its own set of numbers. This is primarily due to the complex rules involved in awarding delegates to the candidates. I’ve been using CNN as a baseline, but this is somewhat arbitrary and not an endorsement of CNN. Their website updates the count frequently and I find it easy to use and informative. See MSNBC and FoxNews for alternative delegate counts.

Sphere: Related Content

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 11:05 am and is filed under Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.