Gap Closing in PA

Looks like the pollster.com trend lines in PA now show Hillary’s lead in PA to be less than 10%. 9.9% at the moment. One poll today actually shows Obama ahead, although it is clearly an outlier. As usual, Obama is narrowing Clinton’s lead as we get closer.

Now, I still don’t expect Obama to win. That would be an amazing stretch from where we are (even though we have almost a whole month yet to go). Although with the lead narrowing like this, you are going to see people start to talk about that. We shall see.

But keep in mind, in terms of the REAL race (as opposed to the spin) Clinton needs to win by better than a 58% to 42% margin (in delegates, not popular vote) in order to make it so that after PA she is closer to winning rather than further away from winning.

The current split on pollster is 50.9% Clinton, 41% Obama, 8.1% Other (Presumably mainly undecided). If we just split the undecideds at the same ratio as Clinton and Obama have among the decided group to “normalize” this, you get: Clinton 55.4%, Obama 44.6%.

Assuming delegate counts will roughly follow popular vote, she has *already* lost the level of lead she needs to be on a pace to catch up with Obama by the convention. With a 55/45 “win” after the delegates are counted, she’ll need to get an even HIGHER percentage of the remaining delegates to win. She needs more than 58% of all remaining delegates (including supers) to win. A 55% “win” is really a loss.

Of course, if she wins by even 50.0000001% in the popular vote, even if she loses in delegates, the spin coming out of that night will still be about her “win” and how she has the momentum now, etc…

Don’t believe the spin, watch the numbers.