Laurent Kretz

Notes: all figures are from February 7th, 10am

As said yesterday, I started doing some maths on the ratios, averages, representations of each Democratic candidate during the super-tuesday. My aim was to illustrate what I claimed two days ago: all votes are not equal.

First, the numbers you are given are estimates. As NBC points out: “Delegate crunching is both an art and a science, and the task can be can annoyingly open to interpretation”. Official numbers of delegates will come later in the race, and might be source of legal litigations.

So I tried to gather some numbers, and that’s when the headache started. The span is enormous between the various estimates:

As you cant see, between the highest and lowest estimates for each candidate, there is a span of 243 delegates for Hillary and 280 for Barack. And even the delta between the estimates for each of the condandidates range from 70 (CBS News) to almost 300 (Fox News). (Reminder: numbers are from Feb 7th, 10am)

The reason why it’s so complicated to define the number of won delegates in a specific State is the same as how to define the number of delegates per State. Each national party has specific by-laws, each State’s party (as the California Democratic Party for instance), and each process (caususes, primaries) is different.

So as Fred Wilson says here, the democrat primary battle is going to last long and be very interesting: they are still quite equal in their chances to win the primary course, and we will concentrate even more on ideas and leadership.

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