Delegate Counting

Tiger and I were in Memphis for a wedding this weekend, so we had to sneak glances at our blackberries as the results came streaming in from the caucuses in Nevada and the Republican primary in South Carolina (the Dems vote in SC next week). Nevada was (and continues to be) pretty ugly on the Democratic side, and I think it's another strike against the idea of weighting caucuses so heavily early in the process.

The conventional wisdom (and we all know how accurate that is) is that both the Democratic and Republican races will go beyond Super-Duper Tuesday on February 5. However, as John Harwood of the New York Times points out in tomorrow's paper, no one has a clue what's going to happen. The patterns that have held for the past 30 years or so in presidential elections have not held this cycle, on either side. I was going to try to work up an analysis of what happens if we get into a delegate race, but there's a large number of moving pieces so it's really hard to guage, but I recommend this analysis from DailyKos which estimates delegates coming out of Super Tuesday if the voting patterns we've seen so far this cycle continue to hold.

If this does go beyond February 5 - different things start to matter. In fact, they already are. My mother's right about superdelegates - their fickle whims will be scrutinized by press and campaigns alike. Also, if John Edwards were to drop out and endorse someone (presumably Obama based on his public statements), his delegates are not obligated to follow his lead. They can vote for whomever they wish. If it's a tight delegate race, you can expect each of those delegates will be getting personal phone calls from Bill, Hill, Barack & Oprah. Because in fact - NONE of the delegates are actually legally or rule-bound to vote for who they said they would vote for. Now - campaigns deliberately reward their most dedicated supporters with spots on the delegate slate, so it's unlikely.

There's a lot of discussion of whether we'll reach a brokered convention on either side. There are a number of institutional pressures that make it highly unlikely on both sides. But we'll be watching.

In other news, Memphis was great. The wedding was at a beautiful Catholic church in downtown Memphis, and it was the first chance I've had to meet Tiger's father's family. All in all a short, but really fun, trip. We've also been watching "The Complete Jane Austen" on PBS. We started in the middle of Northanger Abbey, so didn't really know what was going on since neither of us had ever read it. But it's good.