Note to readers: Out of town on Business all last week and couldn’t get to anything. My apologies.
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com does a terrific job of aggregating every poll in sight and making a collective prediction on election outcomes that’s been reliable for the most part. The 2016 presidential election being an exception.
For the BernieBros in California, Senator Bernie Sanders is projected to win the state primary and about 164.5 delegates. Former Vice President Joe Biden will gain nearly 133. In the 14 statewide contests today, plus American Samoa, Biden will win 8-7 and the primary-by-primary estimate from FiveThirtyEight.com shows that at the end of the counting (which may take days), Biden will be the new front runner with 538.1 delegates to Sanders 523.
The site has projected winners moving forward but hasn’t projected delegate counts for Sanders or Biden for the remaining primaries. Winning states is one thing; winning delegates to claim the nomination is quite the other.
FiveThirtyEight projects that Bernie Sanders will win the following remaining primaries: Michigan, Washington, Idaho, North Dakota, Democrats Abroad (ok, it’s not a state), Arizona and Hawaii.
FiveThirtyEight says Joe Biden will win Missouri, Mississippi, Florida (big too), Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Wyoming, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, New Jersey, Kentucky, Oregon, Nebraska, Kansas, Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Indiana, West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, Washington DC, the Virgin Islands, North Marianas and Puerto Rico.
And while its appears the nomination is Biden’s to lose, it’s all about delegates. For those who argue the candidate with a plurality of votes going into the convention without the magic number to secure the outright nomination, it still looks like Biden unless Bloomberg cuts into his momentum. And its going to be tough for Sanders to walk back his comments on this as he’s the only candidate who supported this idea in the debates.
If and when Senator Elizabeth Warren drops out, it’s debatable where her supporters go. While, politically, she’s more aligned with Sanders, there’s a significant number of her supporters still upset that Sanders denied telling her “a woman couldn’t win.” The two no longer shake hands at debates and Sanders people are upset with Warren and Warren people are upset at Sanders. My guess is Warren’s people go to Biden.
Enjoy the local returns tonight; elections for Congress, State Senate and Assembly, and County Board of Supervisors where I hope Ashleigh Aitken crushes Don Wagner.
Stay out of town. Don’t come back.