Friday, February 8, 2008

Who's Got More Delegates? The Answer is....

If you've been asking this very question "So who's got more delegates now? Who's in the lead? Obama or Clinton?" for the past few days, then you already know that the news media are not helping to relieve your confusion one bit.

At first I thought it was me, but then I read this Wall Street Journal blog that confirmed my suspicians: The media, once again, is playing us for the okey-doke.

What do I mean? If you read Delegates and Super Delegates 101, you know that the only the delegates gained from the primary votes really count right now. The "super delegates" don't officially pledge their vote to a candidate until the Democratic National Convention. So if you are reading the newspaper, internet, or watching a news program and report how many delegates a candidate has CHECK TO SEE IF THEY ARE COUNTING JUST DELEGATES, OR ADDING A PREDICTION ABOUT SUPER DELEGATES ALSO. If they say that the tally includes super delegates, then their total is pure speculation!

The only media outlet that seems to be just counting delegates in its reporting is NBC. Check out their nifty graphics here. According to them, without all this super delegate non-sense that we can't be sure of until the August convention, the score looks like this:

Obama: 861

Clinton: 855

Edwards: 26 (remember, even though he's out of the race, he still got delegates from previous primaries)

So as of Friday, February 8th at 4pm, BARACK OBAMA HAS MORE DELEGATES THAN BILLARY.

These numbers will change:
1. After the rest of the country has its primaries and caucuses.

2. When all this stuff with the close call in New Mexico, and the Florida and Michigan exclusion is figured out.

3. At the Democratic National Convention when the mysterious super delegates cast their votes.

That #3 is the messed up part, ya'll....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Chippy...I think you have your Obama and Hillary numbers switched around...you have Clinton with 4 more than Obama which means she would have more delegates.

GritsNButta said...

How terrible of me (seriously). Although I did include the link so that everyone could see the numbers from the source, I have just corrected the info...

Obama: 861

Clinton: 855

Thanks for letting me know!