superdelegates are fickle. Hilary led Obama something like 150-50 doing the same thing last cycle, using her insider clout to gain the establishment advantage, and then the superdelegates jumped ship once Obama picked up steam and he won convincingly.
You can't pretend that just because she's got the leg up from the party that she's ahead by "394-44" right now as if thats some reflection of her actual performance. If Bernie keeps winning popular votes and surges ahead of her, the party will lose its confidence in her and pull out the backing, because the DNC isn't about to nominate an unpopular candidate for the general election while screwing its voters. In such a scenario, the democratic party would implode. Best case the electorate lashes back and rallies behind a 3rd party run, but more likely it gets a republican in the white house.

Sanders has that same path to beating Hillary as Obama did. And yes, unlike Obama, Sanders will probably get roasted by minorities and fizzle out and leave Hillary the nominee, but its no sure bet. If she can't hold back his momentum and if she keeps getting negative publicity left and right, the dems will pull the rug out from under her and cut their losses.

There's no comparing Clinton's lead among superdelegates in 2016 to her lead in 2008; not only is her lead this year far larger, it's far, far more durable. One of the reasons that the SUPERs transitioned away from Clinton to Obama in 2008 was because the core of the Democratic establishment was actually behind Obama from the beginning, but simply didn't say so for various reasons. The four most-powerful Senators supported him and he had widespread support among both the House and Senate caucuses. His strong performances in the early voting states made it a lot easier for those people who were already inclined to support him to officially switch their allegiance to him, as did the fact that his team was unrelenting in contacting them and staying in touch with them through the race while the Clinton campaign didn't have a real super delegate team at all, and largely offloaded the job to Bill instead of having Hillary personally contact them.

This year is entirely different. Almost the entirety of both Democratic caucuses is solidly behind Clinton, and her team has a robust superdelegate operation with her at the head of it. Defections are harder to come by in this kind of environment; it'd really take a huge, race-defining event to cause the kind of support shakeup we saw after South Carolina in 2008.

And no, Sanders does not have the same path to beating Clinton that Obama had. That's never been more abundantly clear than right now after three states have voted and she's out-organized him in two of them, both caucus states, when he was allowed to outspend her in advertising on account of her saving money for the general election. She's leaving Nevada with a lead of 20-15 among pledged delegates, which would probably grow to 26-17 when you include the supers, when she actually lost the delegate battle there in 2008 despite narrowly winning the popular vote against Obama. There's just no getting around the fact that the vast majority of the Democratic party is solidly behind Hillary Clinton.

3 things really stand out from the Nevada caucus map last night:

1) Trump doing well in Washoe (44% there, almost matching his 46% statewide margin) bodes well for his attempt to score delegates he deserves in Super Tuesday states. A lot of people thought he'd underperform like he did in Iowa, and as a result be reliant on Clark to create his winning margin, but if he's able to perform similarly down the road it should help him collect his fair share of delegates in states like Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, instead of just getting delegate-locked.

2) Cruz's organization is still for real, it's performing as advertised where (and when) it's set up. That really could allow him to deny someone an outright majority of delegates if he wants to drive the race all the way to the convention.

3) Rubio's support is almost non-existent outside of population centers. His Super Tuesday map is going to look hilarious.

Here's a simple "margin expectation" line for tonight with Clinton's largest margins on the left side and Sanders' on the right: AL/GA/Sam./AR/TN/TX/VA/OK/CO/MN/MA/VT.

As usual, everyone is trying to play the expectations game by arguing who "should" win these states and by how much. The Sanders people and most of the political press wants people to believe that Clinton should win everything but Vermont, but more accurately there's a real battle being fought in the 5 states of VA/OK/CO/MN/MA. Sanders needs to win most of them, or at least take away a healthy amount of delegates from them, in order to be able to justify continuing in the race given that he'll lose big in the other states outside of VT. Important districts to watch: GA-12, VA-2, VA-5, MA-6, AR-4, OK-4, TN-2, and TX-SD-14. If Sanders can't win these, and win them decisively, that would likely mean he's getting swamped elsewhere.

For the Republicans the story is "where might Trump not win?" because he's poised to win in most places. Cruz is banking on a victory in Texas, Rubio is praying for a win in Minnesota, Alaska, Oklahoma, or a strong second in Georgia and/or a major upset in Virginia. Trump could conceivably win 10/11 states and take a majority of the delegates on account of threshold rules; there's little suspense on their side of things tonight.

Conventional wisdom expectation line: AL/GA/Sam./AR/TN/TX/VA/OK/CO/MN/MA/VT.

Actual result line: AL/GA/Sam./AR/TN/TX/VA/MA/OK/CO/MN/VT.

Pretty close. Clinton was far stronger in Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Massachusetts than people thought she would be going in. Sanders turned out more voters in Colorado and Minnesota than people predicted, but the flaws in his delegate strategy and operation are even larger than people thought. Will wait for final numbers, but Clinton won the night running away. Nothing needs to be said on the sheer dominance in the South beyond her winning those contests 2:1, 3:1, and in the case of AL 4:1, but it was her delegate performance in Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Virginia that was the most impressive thing.

Your sig smells of pure leftist victim mentality

Kinda interested in what you find impressive about winning 37% of the delegates. Did you find this an over-performance based upon expectations or something else entirely? I'm not sure about the Democrats, but Republican turnout was more than double the last presidential cycle.

yeah! you tell that liberal commie skank!

This post was edited by duffman316 on Mar 2 2016 11:54am

You don't want to be a part of or contribute to the state but you want the welfare and health care
-Socialism harhehehe

This post was edited by WillKill on Mar 2 2016 11:57am

What are chances of a brokered/contested convention if Cruz keeps this up, takes Florida and a few more states?