Choose Your Own Adventure

Or at least your own Democratic outcome - RCP's Jay Cost has put together an HTML-based spreadsheet (Google Docs, perhaps?) which allows you to play with potential outcomes of the remaining Democratic nomination contests (super-delegate primary not included) and see how that affects Hillary's final vote total.

Me? I don't think she's going to lose Montana by 10 points, even though Chris Cillizza took a good look at that yesterday and Obama's clearly got the edge in the ground game; I also think that South Dakota's being closed will result in a closer race or even a Clinton victory (though the fact that SoDak's sole Rep, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, is an Obama supporter - thanks to CC for that tidbit as well - probably helps him in a big way).

Of course, Hillary's trying to move the goalposts, so to speak, once again, with surrogate/super-del Evan Bayh arguing a few days ago that the real metric should be comparing the electoral college votes of states Hillary won versus those Obama own. This is a new spin on Clinton's tired old "I won big states therefore I'm more electable" argument, which no one bought; whether the change of clothes will change perceptions remains to be seen. The irony, of course, is that a few years ago Hillary was all for doing away with the Electoral College and going to a popular election - popular election=popular vote=Obama's winning - thus she's switched sides. However, it's interesting to compare those numbers. So, using the Post's fun Electoral College tool, let's take a look.

Clinton's Wins:


Obama's Wins:


Clinton's got a 61 vote lead by this count, and isn't far from "victory," though the visual effect of this is to show just how many states Obama's won. How many of those he'd carry in a general election is a different question. If Clinton somehow pulls off a near-sweep in the remaining contests, that'll even at least the coloring but only narrow the popular vote and delegate counts (barring a resolution of Florida and Michigan). I'm not going to predict this one...