Democrats will have no winner before convention

Houston Chronicle:

Resting up after a bruising primary battle, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama left Texas in their rearview mirrors Wednesday and headed home to plan for three more months of political combat.

But even as the candidates tried to decipher the daunting math required to lock up the closest Democratic presidential race in a half-century, their surrogates squabbled over which candidate actually won the most delegates in Texas.

The Lone Star State's complicated delegate-selection methods gave both campaigns a plausible reason to claim victory. In final, unofficial results, Clinton won the popular vote, 51 percent to 48 percent. But Obama backers boasted that the Illinois senator had won a majority of the state's pledged delegates — a result of his ability to mobilize supporters in the evening caucuses, which account for about one-third of the delegates selected Tuesday.

"It could be our Texas version of 'Dewey Defeats Truman,' " said Waco Rep. Chet Edwards, an Obama supporter, referring to the infamous Chicago Tribune headline that misstated the 1948 election results. "After all the confetti and uncorked champagne bottles, it could turn out that Obama won Texas."

Projections released Wednesday afternoon by the Texas Democratic Party based on still-incomplete caucus returns indicated that Obama would receive 98 delegates elected Tuesday to Clinton's 95.

Clinton led Obama in delegates selected as a result of primary voting, 65 to 61, while Obama appears headed for a 37-to-30 edge among delegates selected through the caucuses.

Including elected officials and party leaders with automatic "superdelegate" status, the two candidates are dead even at 107 Texas delegates, with 14 superdelegates still uncommitted.

But whichever campaign ends up with Texas bragging rights, Clinton's narrow 12-delegate edge in Tuesday's contests in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont has done little to change the intricate delegate dynamics of 2008.

Bottom line: With just 600 delegates up for grabs and front-runner Obama 658 short of the 2,025 needed for victory, it is mathematically impossible for either candidate to clinch the nomination before the process is scheduled to end with Puerto Rico's June 7 caucuses.

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"The key to the nomination is the superdelegates," said University of Houston government professor Christine LeVeaux-Haley. "The superdelegates seemed to lean to Clinton before Super Tuesday. With her now proving that she is a viable candidate — again — the superdelegates who have been leaning toward Clinton will stick with her."

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A potential wild card is the continuing battle inside the Democratic National Committee over the seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan, two states whose convention votes have been taken away because they scheduled January primaries in violation of party rules.

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And to those who think that Texas' involvement in the selection process is over, consider this: The Texas state Democratic convention falls on the same day as the Puerto Rico primary, so Texas could still come back into play as Clinton and Obama struggle to claim every single vote tied to the still-unsettled Tuesday caucuses.

Obama's math class appears to have miscalculated on what it will take to win. He has been talking about Clinton not being able to get enough delegates to win, but seems have slipped right past the part where he has the same problem. In the bare knuckles fight that remains for the Super Delegates he will be at a disadvantage against the Clinton team. Which ever one prevails, there will be plenty of bruises to try to heal before the general election.

Maria Cocco also crunches the numbers.

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Add up all the states he has won in his historic drive to become the nominee, including all of those small and deeply "red" Republican states where the Obama supporters boast of their candidate's transcendental appeal, and so far Obama has won in places representing 193 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Add up Clinton's victories thus far and she has triumphed in states representing 263 electoral votes.

Of course, some states in Clinton's column -- Texas comes most readily to mind -- that have a large trove of Electoral College votes are highly unlikely to wind up Democratic in the fall. But the same holds true for Obama, whose strength in southern Democratic primaries has rested on the huge margins he has run up among African-American voters. African-Americans are a crucial constituency for Democrats, but their votes in recent contests haven't been enough to win such states as Alabama, South Carolina or Georgia.

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Up until this week McCain has had a similar problem. It is interesting that the electoral numbers are so different from the polling which gives Obama an advantage in the current snapshot.