Three more wins!

Hooray! In case you have not heard yet, Obama has won Washington State, Nebraska, and Louisiana! It looks like he won Washington and Nebraska with leads of over 30%! His momentum is still going strong and I'm excited. The results from Louisiana are still coming in at this time but he has a definite lead there no matter what - it is no Missouri or New Mexico with the even split votes.

Tomorrow will be interesting for two reasons. The first is that Maine will have it's Democratic Causus with 24 delegates up for grab (it may not seem like much but take into account how close Obama and Clinton were earlier today in terms of pledged delegates - it was a matter of single digits). The second is seeing how the delegates from today's caucuses and primaries are split up. Right now, CNN is saying Clinton has 1085 delegates and Obama has 1009 (this includes the imprecise count of superdelegates which is only an estimate). That is without all of the 78 delegates from Washington State and the 66 delegates from Louisiana split up! (Obama gets 17 of Nebraskas; Clinton gets 7).

Now all this math has kind of messed with my brain over the last week or so. I remember listening to NPR between the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary and hearing one of their political analysts assure us that delegate counts have never really mattered and probably wouldn't matter this year. WRONG! This is an unprecedented year, as far as I know, in terms of uncertainty so late in the primaries. Guess what - delegates count this year. Hard to have missed that now... I'm giving myself a week to make a decision on who's delegate count seems the most accurate because honestly, the news network reporting the numbers influences what those number are until things are more settled in the states. As mentioned in a previous post and comments, we are still waiting for absentee ballots to be counted in many huge states like California, which could make a difference of a few delegates distributed on either side. So far I'm still liking NPR the best! They list superdelegates and pledged delegates in seperate columns before adding them up so we can see just how "firm" Clinton's lead is(n't).


As I look at the above, I am thinking to myself "wow, when did my blog posts get so boring and technical!" Probably around the time I got confused. I'm still trying to figure out who to believe and how much hope to have. One of the stories posted on NPR about 20 minutes ago (but no longer to be found) said Obama had won a "decisive" victory. I'm sorry, people, there is nothing decisive about the Democrats right now. Yes, Obama has caught up well with Clinton and has had decisive leads in three states today, but there is nothing decisive about an overall victory! We're going to have to wait probably until March at least for any decisiveness! Texas and Ohio, two of the "larger" states, get to have their say the first week in March, along with the half dozen of the "smaller" states with primaries and caucuses before March 4. I'm sure there are a lot of math people employed on all sides of the campaign and the media trying to figure out who needs what votes where. However, no one is telling me, that's for sure. I'm just as confused as I was 15 minutes ago when I started writing this post.

Well, I guess satisfaction and security must once again wait for another day (at least in terms of knowing Obama will be our next president).

For now I guess I'll celebrate the wins of today and look forward to having many more suspenseful moments to come in this election year!