{"id":931,"date":"2008-05-21T16:37:51","date_gmt":"2008-05-21T15:37:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=931"},"modified":"2008-05-21T16:37:51","modified_gmt":"2008-05-21T15:37:51","slug":"the-american-presidential-election-35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=931","title":{"rendered":"The American presidential election (35)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After yesterday&#8217;s primary contests in Kentucky and Oregon, Associated Press projects that Barack Obama has 1,956 of the 2,026 pledged delegates and super delegates needed to claim the nomination, compared to Hillary Clinton\u2019s 1,776 total delegates. Obama\u2019s campaign estimates that, if he simply held his own in the three remaining contests (Montana, South Dakota and Puerto Rico), he would then need only 25 more votes from super delegates to secure the nomination. There are 221 undeclared super delegates left.<br \/>\nAlready Obama has passed a crucial psychological point: he has a majority of the pledged delegates that will go to the Convention. This will ultimately deliver him what is called <a href=\"http:\/\/demconwatch.blogspot.com\/2008\/03\/superdelegates-pledging-to-back.html\">&#8220;the Pelosi Club&#8221;<\/a> &#8211; a list of super delegates who have specifically committed to vote for the leader in pledged delegates.<br \/>\nMeanwhile Clinton will be hoping that she can persuade the forthcoming meeting of the Rules &#038; Bylaws Committee (RBC) for the 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC) to reinstate the so far invalid votes of Florida and Michigan. Theoretically there are more potential delegates being discussed at the RBC meeting (366) than all the pledged delegates left to be selected and the uncommitted super delegates combined, leading some commentators to call the meeting the biggest &#8220;primary&#8221; left.<br \/>\nOf course, if the Clinton campaign won its way, this would be tantamount to endorsement of rule-breaking and would rightly unleash the wrath of the Obama campaign &#8211; so it isn&#8217;t going to happen. The last three states will have their votes, most of the so far undeclared super delegates will then back the man with the most pledged delegates, and Clinton will pull out of the race in June well before the Convention in August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After yesterday&#8217;s primary contests in Kentucky and Oregon, Associated Press projects that Barack Obama has 1,956 of the 2,026 pledged delegates and super delegates needed to claim the nomination, compared to Hillary Clinton\u2019s 1,776 total delegates. Obama\u2019s campaign estimates that, if he simply held his own in the three remaining contests (Montana, South Dakota and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}