It's All About Hillary

As expected by pretty much all the polls, Hillary won the Pennsylvania primary. She did a bit better than I expected--I figured her for about a 6 or 7 percent lead, and she pulled up to 10 percent. According to the AP, the victory was good for "staving off elimination" in the race for the Democratic nomination. Hillary herself, though, is spinning it as "the tide is turning," which may be a bit of an overstatement. I'm not sure what's going to change, particularly. She'll still be overwhelmingly behind, in both the popular vote and the delegate count. And without winning overwhelmingly tonight, she's got a lot less room left in which to catch Obama. Although they may be quiet for the next couple of days, I suspect that the calls for her to withdraw will continue to grow. Essentially, Hillary hasn't been doing much more than keeping her head above water, and now she'll be able to keep doing that for a while longer.

When it comes to actual numbers, MSNBC estimates that, at this point, Hillary has netted ten on Obama, with eighteen still to be allocated. Their total delegate count (including superdelegates) puts Obama at 1719 and Hillary at 1588. There are just under 900 delegates (again, including the superdelegates) yet to be assigned. To even tie Obama, she needs to get about 60 percent of the remaining delegates. You don't have to believe me, just check out MSNBC's Chuck Todd.

So what happens next? As I suggested above, nothing much beyond just more of the same. This time, we've only got eleven days until the next contest, caucuses in Guam, and then it's just three days beyond that to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. It may be early for predictions yet, but I suspect that Hillary will keep up there, too. More status quo, but even more impossible for Hillary to catch Obama.