Before making wild accusations about accuracy or motives, read this.
Last Saturday April 9th was the closed caucus in the state of Wyoming. Sanders won, taking 56% of the state convention delegates. In all, because of the proportional system for awarding delegates, the candidates split the delegates taking 7 each, which means that although she lost more counties, Clinton won the largest and more Democratic ones.
That makes the next contest the much talked about closed primary in New York on Tuesday April 19th, with 247 delegates to be allocated.
There are 1,647 pledged delegates remaining, and 1,845 total with pledged and unpledged(super). Although there is a much quoted number, 58%, that comes from 538 and is claimed as a threshold for Sanders to win the nomination, that claim is not true.
The 58% number from 538 is the win percentage Sanders needs simply to take the lead in pledged delegates. It is not the number he needs to reach the 2,383 total needed for nomination, and it does not include unpledged super delegates. As you can see from our numbers, Sanders needs 1,289 of the remaining 1,647 to win on pledged delegates. That makes his needed win percentage closer to 78% even if you add super delegates, as it is very likely he will end with around 50 super delegates or less.
As you can see, this chart does not report vote totals for the Wyoming caucus. Few caucuses report vote totals and the same is true for Wyoming. There are however some interesting unofficial numbers to report.
Democratic party officials report that although turnout was high, it was not as high as 2008, which holds the record at 8,600 caucus attendees. No, that’s not a typo. Wyoming is a sparsely populated state with only around 41,000 registered Democrats. This primary around 7,000 Democrats attended the caucuses. That means there was about a 17% participation rate from Democrats.
If revolution is the order of the day, the numbers certainly don’t show it. Sanders’ wins are coming largely from states where there is low turnout and low participation. Weirdly, the more he calls for ‘huge’ turnouts, the lower the participation seems to go.
Democrats in Wyoming had 5,000 new registrations before this year’s caucus. Assuming all those people registered and were interested in caucusing, that number is 71% of the total participants in the caucuses. Yet Sanders barely won more than half of the votes. Clearly somewhere there is a disconnect between the Sanders campaign message and the reality.
Although there is a lot of talk about turnout, uncertainty of future elections, flipping super delegates, and a contested convention, at this point it is extremely difficult to envision a path that leads to anything but a Hillary Clinton nomination.
I regularly get attacked by Bernie supporters. The funny thing about these primary updates is that I get attacked from both sides.
These numbers are accurate. No, CNN, the AP, and Real Clear Politics do not have accurate numbers. They simply report the numbers from election night and often do not update with corrections until the next election night, if at all. They often have charts that auto update without accounting for differences in caucus and primary states.
For example: this chart does not include popular votes for this past Saturday in Wyoming. They were not reported or tracked, at least not accurately. RCP however has reported the State Convention Delegates as popular votes and added them to the candidate totals. And so some are confused, believing only a few hundred Democrats voted in Wyoming.
These numbers are based on the latest information and use the Democratic Party allocation formula, and are updated to account for changes, like the changes in Clark County, Nevada at the Democratic convention. There is still a limit to their accuracy. As Nevada shows, no delegate counts are final until they are allocated at the Democratic convention in July.