It’s the end of the road for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. A few signs lately have pointed towards Hillary finally packing it in, and after Barack Obama sweeps up enough of the black vote in the urban strongholds of Montana and South Dakota today to claim victory in these final two primary states, it’s likely that Clinton’s campaign will offer a formal concession. Hillary’s last-ditch effort to convince the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to seat Michigan and Florida’s entire slates of delegates with full voting status (and award all of said delegates to her) failed, and her pitch to undecided superdelegates over the last month has mostly been falling on deaf ears. By the end, her surrogates’ statements about the which states “mattered” and specific, irrelevant ways the popular vote could be tallied to produce a slim lead for Hillary were beginning to insult everyone’s intelligence.
The nomination is decided by delegates. In the primary process, the total popular vote is no more critical to the outcome of the contest than passing yardage is to the outcome of a football game. Having Hillary attract superdelegates based on an absurdly subjective interpretation of which votes to count would be like seeing Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy persuade the NFL that his team should represent their conference in the Superbowl because, even though his team had a lower number of points than the Giants in the NFC championship game, they forced more fumbles and had a higher field goal kicking percentage and would be a stronger matchup against the Patriots.
