Delegates – I Don’t Get The Math – Help Please?
It looks like the Democrats are going to seat 50% of the Michigan and Florida delegates. I started looking at the numbers and became very confused. I have a few questions.
1. Are there going to be a lot of uncommitted “pledged” delegates at the convention – i.e. the 40% of Michigan who voted uncommitted. Does that mean there will be 30 delegates there who can vote for whoever they want? (i.e. 156 delegates x 0.4 x 0.5 = 30).
2. I understand that the 19 Edwards delegates can vote for whoever they want, but they’ll *probably* vote Obama because that’s who Edwards endorsed.
So, if I’m right, there will be almost 50 “pledged” delegates at the convention in addition to all of the non-committed supers who can vote. By my math, Hillary and Obama are going to be within about 100 delegates of each other at the convention if the 50% ruling comes down and she wins P.R. as expected. Plus, she’d be able to argue about the “disenfranchised” other 50% …
Is my math right?
Thanks.
The reality is that even pledge delegates may vote for whomever they want. At the conventions for both parties there are speeches and rousing cheers for a while. After the normal hubbub, the delegates from each state vote, usually picking a favorite son, or daughter from their individual states on the first ballot (this is a kind of acknowledgment of party loyalists) then voting seriously for a candidate. Most pledged delegates will vote for the candidate they pledged to vote for, but this is not required by any law or rule. The final count is not actually in yet. This weekend the DNC is meeting to make the BIG decision on delegates. In the long run, it does appear that some voters will be disenfranchised.
MI and FL delegate STRENGTH will be at 50% of what would have been available. The porportion has yet to be decided.
You forget those super delegates will be declared by June 10, a week after the last primary. The nomination will be decided before the convention.
Whatever they do, you can bet its going to be in B. Hussein Obamas favor in fear of riots galore. 1.8 million voters disenfranchised by the DNC. Unbelievable.
Well your math is basically right but we still don’t know whether the convention will seat the Michigan uncomitted as Obama voters. That would change the entire story.
doesn’t really matter…. unless they were to give her ALL the delegates she can’t win…
Fl and MI are out… they are no factor either way…
I cannot find it now but I saw a breakdown of the delegate math with several scenarios. In none of them did Hillary take a majority of pledged delegates.
In all liklihood, Fl and MI will get 50% of their delegates seated, with Obama getting the 40% uncommitted vote in MI. That will not come close to helping her make up the 150 delegate lead that Obama has.
National polls now are giving Obama a 15% edge over Hillary, so he has no argument that voters are changing their mind and that early Obama voters would vote for her now if given the chance. I can’t think of any argument she has to sway Superdelegates which now favor Obama by about 45 votes. The popular vote doesn’t wash, because that is irrelevant. Obama’s totals in that get cheated by the fact that several caucus states that he won big don’t even release their popualr votes. Not to mention the fact that the nomination has NEVER been based on popular votes.
Of course the MI and FL situtation has not yet been decide. So, your math is not wrong, its just speculation, just as mine is.
We won’t know how many of the delegates, if any at all, that Michigan and Florida will seat. I love that CNN and the other biased left-wing nutjob news stations say that Obama never campaigned in either state, when he had radio and television ads running in both states. Hillary didn’t have as many ads as Obama did, and she won by hundreds of thousands of votes in Florida. And they claim that in Michigan, he wasn’t on the ballot. Yet Obama supporters were told to vote “no affiliation” or something. That is why Hillary won 60-40%. What Hillary is after the most is the popular vote. If she wins the popular vote from Florida and Michigan, plus Puerto Rico and the other states that are voting, she will win in the popular vote. Then she can fairly make the argument that a couple thousand delegates shouldn’t overweigh 18 or so million votes since the primaries began.
If they do count Florida and Michigan at 50% than the Democrats have lost. They are rewarding states that broke the rules and they had the punishment spelled out. Remember that Obama and the others didn’t have their names on the Michigan ballot only Hillary Clinton broke rules and kept her name on it. This just goes to show how much they want Clinton to be the next candidate for President and how she will do anything to get the nod.