What fun if both Democrats’ and Republicans’ conventions get hung-up, with the decisions ultimately decided by various underhanded machinations. If Sanders and Trump are denied nominations after winning in actual primary votes, we might have the first stirrings of revolution. From Darrell Delamaide on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The mainstream media is misleading the public by adopting a “fuzzy math” in treating the delegate counts for the Democratic nominating convention as carved in stone.
Given its bias against Donald Trump, the media are happy to parrot the Republican establishment’s prediction that their convention in Cleveland will be an “open convention” — that is, open to manipulation by the apparatchiks and the rules they set.
By the same token, given its pronounced bias in favor of Hillary Clinton, the media gladly repeat the spin of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic establishment by portraying that party’s contest as essentially over.
Not only compromised television anchors like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, whose wife is drawing support from various Clintonites in her bid for a congressional seat in Maryland, are implying that the Democratic frontrunner’s lead in delegates is insurmountable. As a rule, pundits and even print reporters glibly adopt the inevitability spin.
So when campaign strategists for Bernie Sanders hint at a contested convention, the Clinton campaign is quick to tweet “delusional,” and the press is happy to fall in line.
Even the redoubtable Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight team so brilliantly charted Barack Obama’s electoral victories in 2008 and 2012, has gone along with the presumptions and polls that make a Clinton nomination all but certain.
Even so, Silver and his team have enough sense to leave the superdelegates out of the equation for the present.
Having set a target of how many delegates the two candidates must get in each primary to reach the 2,026 needed for a majority of pledged delegates, the FiveThirtyEight tracking currently has Clinton at 107% of her target and Sanders at 93%.
However, Sanders has met or exceeded his targets in seven of the last eight contests, while Clinton has fallen short six out of eight, so the momentum suggests Sanders will continue to narrow that gap.
The delegate math that considers Clinton the inevitable winner, then, is based on the presumption that the 469 superdelegates — elected officials and party leaders — who have previously declared their support for Clinton will in fact vote for her.
To continue reading: Hillary Clinton’s ‘insurmountable’ lead is fuzzy math
Things are getting interesting.