FiveThirtyEight last night lamented Sanders for not hitting his delegate targets in Louisiana, Kansas, and Nebraska. But their math was wrong.
Sanders Won More States, But He Lost The Day
Let’s take a look at the math. Sanders won 23 delegates in Kansas to Clinton’s 10. He won — preliminarily — 14 delegates in Nebraska to Clinton’s 11 (Wrong 15-10). That’s a margin of 16 delegates.
In losing Louisiana, however, Sanders only claimed 12 delegates to Clinton’s 39 (Wrong 14-37).
Combine the three states, and Clinton gained 11 delegates on Sanders (Wrong +5 Clinton lead).
Now you might be saying, but didn’t we expect Sanders to do poorly in Louisiana? Yes, that’s true. But according to our delegate targets, which takes that into account, Sanders is now 3 delegates (Wrong, he hit his target!) further behind the pace he needs to win a majority of pledged delegate than he was at the beginning of the day. Considering he was already running 82 delegates behind his delegate goals, he needs to be exceeding his delegate targets.
Sanders ended up getting two more delegates from LA than they thought and got an extra delegate in Nebraska. In other words, they were in such a rush to declare the race the night a loss for Sanders, they didn’t bother to wait for the actual numbers to come in. Now that Maine has been called for Sanders, he is either going to tie his target to win the nomination or beat it.
Sanders will likely get at least get a 15-10 split in Maine and may get a 17-8 split depending on how the last 20% of precincts report. That will make him either win or tie the weekend in delegates, but also win or tie what he needed this weekend to meet their targets for him to win the nomination.
(Updated to get the latest counts and link using the NYTimes)
Edit: People have interpreted my line about rushing that it meant I was saying they were biased. That was not my intent, so I have crossed that out.