After the sprint of twenty-four contests in fifteen days, this week’s four primaries represents a slowing of the pace.  After the March 17 contests, there will be only seven contests over the next three weeks concluding with the Wisconsin primary before there is a three-week break between Wisconsin and the Mid-Atlantic primary on April 28.  (EDIT:  Now six contests, with Georgia’s primary being postponed until May.)

In the last two weeks, in the states that vote by mail, we have seen the early results showing significant number of votes for candidates that are no longer in the race.  As counting has continued, however, the later arriving ballots have swung away from the candidates who have suspended their campaigns and toward Senator Sanders and Vice-President Biden.  There will have been some early voting in the states that are voting on March 17.  As such, the initial release of numbers will probably include some votes for these candidates, but that number should decline over the evening as election day returns are added in.

With the narrowing of the field, delegate math is now a state-by-state struggle.  And this state-by-state battle is different for the Democratic primaries than it is on the Republican side.  The media likes to focus on who wins a state.  And, in the general election (and in many states on the Republican side), the winner-take-all rule makes winning a state very important.  On the Democratic side, the proportional allocation of delegates means that it matters more whether somebody wins a state by a large margin than who wins the state.  As we have seen over the past seven days, a narrow in by Vice-President Biden is currently netting him around seven delegates in a large state, but his big win in Mississippi (less than half the size of Washington) is netting him over thirty delegates. Continue Reading...