Bernie Sanders Closes Delegate Gap To 194 Ahead Of New York Primary

Many of Bernie Sanders’ supporters have been complaining about the media including superdelegates in the Democratic primary counts, showing Hillary Clinton with a commanding lead over Sanders, even though those votes could change at any time. But now the Huffington Post has come out with an updated set of numbers for the pledged delegates that shows a much closer race than what everyone else is reporting, and the media is also misrepresenting the pledged delegates won so far. In fact, the pledged delegate count gap has dropped below 200 between Clinton and Sanders, with many big states still to come in the primary, namely New York on Tuesday.

In other words, Hillary Clinton’s delegate lead is not as “insurmountable” as what the corporate media and pundits are saying, according to HuffPost Politics. With 247 pledged delegates at stake in New York alone, Sanders’ supporters could still see a major upset in the Democratic Party with Bernie Sanders’ snowballing momentum.

Huffington Post listed the total delegates for Hillary Clinton as 1,299 to Bernie Sanders 1,105. That’s a difference of only 194 delegates with the big states of New York and California still pending, as well as other delegate-rich states like Pennsylvania. The remaining states in the Democratic primary account for 1,674 pledged delegates still up for grabs in the next 20 primary and caucus contests.

Superdelegates are usually politicians or civic leaders who have a delegate vote they alone choose, and they are not bound by primary or caucus results as to how they cast their vote. Clinton, who everyone in the Democratic Party knew was running for president for the last few years, so far claims the lion’s share of superdelegates with people who have said they would vote for her at the Democratic convention long before the Sanders campaign came along. But just as they did in 2008 when many superdelegates changed their allegiance to Barack Obama, some of those superdelegates are already jumping ship to Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

Even though the use of superdelegates in itself is coming under fire for its potential to skew elections to establishment candidates, there are still plenty of pledged delegates up for grabs to allow either Clinton or Sanders to lock up the nomination before any superdelegates even have a chance to cast their vote. And just as Bernie Sanders’ campaign predicted, Clinton’s early lead came as a result of the southern-heavy early primaries, but now Sanders has won eight of nine contests to cut the pledged delegate lead to under 200.

While the latest polls in New York still show Clinton with a single-digit lead over Bernie Sanders, he has already shown that not only can he close that gap on election day, but upset the odds by winning as he did in Michigan. With strong support and rallies in New York, Sanders may pull off an upset in what both candidates claim as their “home state.” Hillary Clinton moved to New York and became a senator there, even though she grew up in Illinois and lived many years in Arkansas, but Bernie Sanders grew up in Brooklyn before becoming the senator from Vermont.

Some of the delegate gains Sanders has made include a difference between caucus counts on election days, and the actual caucus convention, with Sanders picking up a six-delegate gain to reduce the difference by 12 in Colorado (Clinton lost six and Sanders gained six for a net change of 12). Then Sanders scored a net change of four in Clinton’s leads in both Nevada and Missouri, for a total delegate shift of 20 in those three states. Sanders also reduced Clinton’s lead by four delegates in Arizona in the last two weeks, so that’s a reduction in Clinton’s lead by 24 delegates even though there hasn’t been a Democratic primary contest since April 9.

On Tuesday, not only will New York hold their primary with 247 delegates, but Connecticut has 55 pledged delegates and Delaware has 21 pledged delegates on the line. As far as superdelegates, Democrats can worry about them if neither Clinton nor Sanders reaches the threshold 2,383 votes needed to lock up the nomination before the convention. Otherwise, even the DNC has asked the media to stop counting superdelegates in their numbers, although CBS, NBC, and Politico refuse to comply with that request, according to a listing of delegate count discrepancies by Huffington Post.

By following the counts of actual pledged delegates, the Democratic national primary is still a close race and far from over.

[Photo by AP Photo/Mary Altaffer]