Obama is Winning Texas
Since the Texas primary last week, the media has been referring to Texas as a Clinton win and moved on to Mississippi and Pennsylvania. That was much of what was discussed on Fox News and CNN tonight.
I was trying to understand what the effective "win" number is for Obama. I figured it is the total number of Democratic delegates *minus* the super delegates divided by 2 plus 1. If Obama goes into the convention with one more delegate than Hillary, how can the super delegates override this? No matter... as I was looking at the CNN tally site I saw *TWO* entries for Texas. One for the primaries and one for the caucuses... which are only 41% counted. (They'll be counting until March 24.... very manual.)
So while Clinton beat Obama in the primaries 77 to 71 (or a net 6 delegate gain), projections are showing Obama beating Clinton in the Texas caucus 38 to 29 (a net 9 delegate gain.) This puts Obama winning Texas with a 9 - 6 = 3 delegate lead... a state that was supposed to be a "Clinton firewall."
This was not mentioned on any of the news shows I watched tonight, but some bloggers are noticing. The media have no patience for slow countin' Texans.
ABC News had something just before the election saying that even if Hillary was ahead in the polls, that Texas has some formula that gives weight depending on how many people in each area actually voted democrat in the last presidential election. That way areas that are likely to vote Republican in the general election are given less weight. This was supposed to favor Obama. It could be that the caucuses are the part that takes that weight into account.
U. S. News said they Hilliary has very little chance of catching Obama. The only thing that might ascew this, is that they could do a recount in Florida and Michigan. That would change everything. However, I read or heard that if they do a recount it would have to be another complete vote by mail. That makes sense since Obama wasn't even on the ticket at that point. At least, that's what I heard.
Vote by mail is not a simple solution because neither state is set up for it. For example, they have no way of keeping republicans (who already voted in the republican primary) from flooding the vote. The state of Washington took 10 years to get vote-by-mail working. I don't think any state can do it in a few months.
About the same time I wrote the post above, CNN confirmed it... "Every procedure used to statistically model the outcome of the caucuses indicated that Obama had more support [in Texas delegates] than Clinton." - CNN.com
I thought a person had to identify themselves to comment. Who is "CNN"