With Obama Wins, What’s the New Delegate Count?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Chuck Todd of MSNBC is the delegate yoda. According to his calculations, Obama will get 49 to 52 delegates out of Virginia, while Clinton will get 31 to 34. (More info on Obama’s Virginia win here.)

If you add those numbers to MSNBC’s pledged delegate count, you get totals of roughly 1080 for Obama and 980 for Clinton. Why is that important? Because Clinton has a superdelegate lead of 85-90 over Obama. For the first time, Obama has won enough delegates from various primaries and caucuses to overtake Clinton’s advantage with superdelegates. If Obama continues to open up a lead in pledged delegates, I would suspect that more and more superdelegates would come out in support of him, despite all the pressure the Clinton campaign will inevitably bring to bear, because they do not want to create a disastrous situation where the will of the superdelegates overturns the will of the people.

But we’re getting well ahead of ourselves. As the Clinton campaign is reminding everybody, Ohio and Texas loom. Heck, we don’t even know who won Maryland tonight!

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate