Curmudgeon's Corner: How's the Weather?

Sam and Ivan talk about:

• Florida Fires
• Stupid Seattle People and Water
• Online Videos
• Appeasement
• Chinese Earthquake
• Nuclear Power
• Going Cashless
• Dems: When Will it End?
• States in Play for the General

KY/OR Predictions

OK, as I've done before the last few primaries, I'll make a prediction for the results from today's primaries based on the latest poll averages. I won't bother splitting it up by the two states, because only the total delegate count really matters.

There are 103 delegates at stake in today's primaries.

My prediction... 58 for Clinton, 45 for Obama.

That will be 56.3% of the delegates for Clinton, which is of course well short of the 74.4% she would need to get to be on a pace to catch up and win.

Delegates Before KY/OR

A few more superdelegates today. Five for Obama. One for Clinton.

The new delegate count is: Obama 1909, Clinton 1718, Edwards 9

In percent terms that is: Obama 52.5%, Clinton 47.2%, Edwards 0.2%

2026 delegates are needed to win.

There are 414 delegates yet to be determined.

Obama needs 117 more delegates to win.

Clinton needs 308 more delegates to win.

In percentage terms, that means:

Obama needs 28.3% of the remaining delegates to win. (It was 33.7% before WV.)

Clinton needs 74.4% of the remaining delegates to win. (It was 70.8% before WV.)

Will Clinton get the 74.4% of the delegates from KY/OR that she needs to be on pace to win? Ha! Yeah right. At this point it is really just a countdown until Obama gets the number he needs. This may change from 2026 to a higher number depending on what is decided about Florida and Michigan, but even the Clinton getting absolutely her best case result out of that wouldn't be enough for her to catch up.

I'll still be glued to the TV for the results tonight anyway of course.

Analysis of a Tie

A very detailed analysis on the odds of an electoral college tie, and what would happen if that happened...

Like Kissing Your Sister
(FiveThirtyEight.com)

Since we got some good discussion started in the polling thread about the possibility of a 269-269 electoral tie, I thought I'd run some numbers on it.

The simulation returned a tie 63 times out of 10,000 trials (0.63%). These 63 ties involved 56 distinct scenarios for producing that tie. The only scenarios to occur more than once were as follows:

...