Hillary's Campaign has revealed their so-called "Nuclear" option: To use Hillary's supporters on the Rules & Bylaws committee of the Democratic Party to push through a resolution overturning the decision not to seat Michigan and Florida. The two states, whose delegates currently do not count because they broke Democratic party rules by holding their primaries too early, favored Sen. Clinton by a considerable margin.
In fact, after Obama's blowout North Carolina victory yesterday and his unexpectedly narrow loss in Indiana, many pundits are still saying that Hillary has a real shot if she can pull this off. Conservative Sean Hannity said on his radio show earlier today that Obama will basically be forced to take a position trying to prevent those delegates from being seated and that will not only turn off a lot of Democrats to Sen. Obama (making him even more unelectable than he supposedly already is), but it will allow Sen. Clinton to look like the "good guy" and possibly gain more superdelegates.
But this just isn't correct.
As of today Sen. Obama has 1588 pledged delegates and Sen. Clinton has 1422 (we'll get to superdelegates in a minute). Because Sen. Obama's name wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan the Clinton Campaign really has no choice but to agree to allow Michigan's "unpledged" pledged delegates to go for Obama.
Making that the
only change and then seating the delegates as-is Senator Clinton would receive an additional 192 pledged delegates while Senator Obama would receive 126. This shrinks his lead by 66 delegates, but right now he's leading by 166 pledged delegates so even if you seat Michigan and Florida he would still be leading by 100 pledged delegates.
So let's look to what's left: West Virginia, Oregon, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota. Altogether 217 delegates. In order to catch up, Senator Clinton would need to win 74% of all remaining pledged delegates. She is favored in most of the remaining primaries, but not by that much.
Right here is a huge pitfall. It's a hard sell to convince superdelegates to go against the candidate who won the most states, the most popular vote and the undisputed majority of pledged delegates, even counting Florida and Michigan — but keep in mind Hillary's Campaign has been blowing smoke for a while now and not failing entirely. They even still have some people thinking Sen. Clinton is leading in the popular vote, when in fact if you count the votes against her in Michigan as Obama votes (since he wasn't on the ballot) then he's been beating her solidly on the popular vote and every other metric this whole time.
But superdelegates are her only hope, since winning 74% of the remaining pledged delegates would be essentially impossible. With that in mind, let's go with a more realistic (but still unrealistic) scenario. Let's suppose she wins 65% to 35% on-average for the last 6 contests. That gives her 141 of the remaining delegates while he gets only 76. Bear with me now, I hate math too but sometimes it's important (apparently not to Clinton Staffers though).
That would narrow Obama's lead in pledged delegates to 35. Now she's still leading him in superdelegates by 11 currently so before we start allocating more superdelegates she's working from a deficit of 24 delegates overall. There are 264 undeclared superdelegates, she would need to convince 55% of them to vote for her.
That may not seem like a lot, but let's put it another way: Sen. Obama's argument will be that he has the most pledged delegates, the most States-won and the most popular votes. Hillary's only argument would be that he can't carry the states and/or voters who "matter" (in her estimation). Obama only needs to convince 46% of the remaining superdelegates that they should vote for the winner. Hillary has to convince 55% of the superdelegates that the guy who actually won, can't win.
Add to this the fact that even after her win in Pennsylvania, Sen. Obama got more superdelegates declaring for him than she did. So even if they seat Michigan and Florida pretty much as-is she simply can't win without convincing superdelegates who already are trending against her that they should vote for the loser. And that's why Hillary's so-called "Nuclear" option is nothing more than a party popper, and a dud at that.
Realistically her only hope for getting those desperately needed superdelegates is for something devastating to break on Barack Obama, and at this point if such a story did break it would be traced back to her campaign — whether or not it originated from them — and everyone would be talking about how she's willing to destroy her own party to obtain the Presidency, or how she's willing to destroy her party's nominee so that she can run as the "I told you so" candidate in 2012.
Everyone in her party would despise her, yet that's the only chance she has of becoming President. Let's see how that works out for her.
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