I need a little help with numbers... [View All]

[lapfog_1]

I confess that I stayed up all night last night, and it's late again tonight. So late the my eyes keeping blinking.

Anyway, I am curious about a number...

We all know about the "magic" number of delegates either Obama or Hillary need to win to clinch the nomination in the first ballot. I.e the raw number of delegates needed to win minus the number of pledged delegates each has.

The number I'm interested in is what I'm going to call the imaginary number. Imagine if ALL super delegates are added to your total for the first ballot, plus all of the pledged deletes you have so far. What is the number of pledged delegates you need in addition to secure the nomination?

Then I'd like to know what the imaginary number is for each candidate... and the ratio of that number to the number of delegates left (1/5th or 1/4th or whatever).

It's a true "imagine if" scenario... but I just have this feeling that the Gang of Five (Gore, Pelosi, Reid, Edwards, and I can't remember the fifth!) might just have a pre-convention meeting in the next few weeks with all of the super delegates and put it to them that they need to act as a body to allow the first candidate comfortably into negative imaginary numbers to win by telling the trailing candidate to close up shop. And they CAN enforce this within all the rules, simply by pledging to act in mass (or nearly so).

A floor fight about FL and MI and supers and possible pledged delegate poaching and stuff just doesn't sound very good.