Irish Trojan in Tennessee

Notre Dame finally beats USC in football

By Brendan Loy

Well, in football recruiting, anyway. Today was National Signing Day, and the Irish recruiting class is ranked #2 by both Rivals and Scout. USC is #10 and #13, respectively, their lowest rankings since 2002 (and behind UCLA, according to Scout... ugh!).

The Great Super Tuesday Tornado Outbreak of 2008

By Brendan Loy

Dr. Jeff Masters: "The death toll from the 2008 Super Tuesday Tornado Outbreak makes it the deadliest tornado outbreak in the past 23 years."

And it's the deadliest tornado outbreak this early on the calendar since 1949.

The death toll is at least 54.

As Dr. Masters's map demonstrates, East Tennessee was spared. By the time the thunderstorms got here around 8:00 AM this morning, they were producing only torrential rains, gusty winds and lightning -- nothing too terrible. Later in the day, after the cold front that produced the storms had moved through, we got (and are still getting) some pretty strong winds on the back side of the system, causing the Tennessee River to look rather choppy from the parking garage where I park for work:

But yeah, no tornadoes or anything similarly devastating, thank goodness.

In West Tennessee (see also here) and Middle Tennessee, of course, it's an entirely different story.

It's all about the superdelegates

By Brendan Loy

It may be premature to say that the 2008 presidential nominee of the Democratic Party won't be determined until the national convention in August. But it is definitely not premature to say this: unless somebody drops out or cuts a deal between now and August, the nominee will be chosen by superdelegates.

Whatever the media might tell you about the potential decisiveness of the primaries on March 4 (Texas and Ohio) or April 22 (Pennsylvania), it is now essentially impossible for either Clinton or Obama to "clinch" the threshold 2,025 delegates needed to nominate during the primary and caucus season. Neither can win the nomination with pledged delegates alone. In fact, they can't even come close.

Before yesterday's contests, the pledged delegate count stood at Obama 63, Clinton 48, according to The Green Papers. Now, if NBC's estimate of the Super Tuesday pledged-delegate breakdown is correct, the tally -- again, counting pledged delegates only, not superdelegates, who are by definition free to change their minds at any time -- looks something like Obama 908, Clinton 883 (give or take 10 delegates), with 1,428 pledged delegates still outstanding.

The math is pretty straightforward. In order to reach 2,025 without depending on superdelegates, either Obama or Clinton would need to win something like 80% of the remaining pledged delegates. Obviously, in a tight race governed by proportional allocation rules, there is no way on God's green earth that's going to happen. In fact, I'd say any ratio more lopsided than, say, 60-40, seems totally outlandish under the circumstances.

So... where does that leave us? Assuming that neither candidate collects more than 60% of the remaining 1,428 pledged delegates, nobody will have more than 1,765, or thereabouts, of the 3,253 pledged delegates when all is said and done. The leader will thus finish somewhere between 250 and 400 delegates short of the magical "needed to nominate" finish line (2,025), with the trailing candidate no more than ~550 delegates away. It'll be up to the 800 superdelegates to decide whom to push over the finish line.

Tim McDonald wins GOP contest; Loy, Brown battle in Dem, combined contests

By Brendan Loy

In light of my post below about California delegate allocations, in concert with my earlier post about Irish Trojan Super Tuesday Prediction Contest scenarios, BrendanLoy.com can now make some projections regarding the contest winners. (Cue dramatic music, swooshing graphics, and Wolf Blitzer needlessly repeating every third word out of his mouth.)

Tim McDonald will win the Republican contest by virtue of the John McCain California delegate tiebreaker. McCain will get at least 155 of the Golden State's 170 delegates; McDonald predicted he'd get 110, the highest number among the four contestants who tied for first place with 17-for-21 prediction records. Joe Loy (who said McCain would get 98 delegates) finishes second; Marty West (88) finishes third; and Andrew Bottom (88) finishes fourth.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, it's a two-man race between Joe Loy and Ben Brown. Sam Cialek, who is tied with Loy and Brown with a 20-for-22 prediction record, is nevertheless eliminated from the Democratic contest because his prediction of Hillary Clinton's California delegate total (170) is lower than Loy's (190), which is in turn closer to Clinton's actual projected total of 207. However, in order to win the contest, Loy needs to avoid finishing tied for first place with Brown, who predicted that Clinton would get 191 delegates in the Golden State. Thus, Loy needs Clinton to win New Mexico and Obama to win Democrats Abroad. If both of those things happen, Loy wins; if either one doesn't happen, Brown wins.

The scenarios for the combined contest remain unchanged from my previous update. It is also a two-man race between Loy and Brown, like the Democratic contest, but the contestants' needs are different (because Brown got one more state wrong on the GOP side than Loy did). In the combined contest, Loy needs only one of the above-mentioned events (Clinton winning New Mexico, Obama winning Democrats Abroad) to happen; Brown needs them both to not happen.

CA delegates: Clinton 207, Obama 163; McCain 155, Romney 6

By Brendan Loy

Looking at the California congressional district results on the Democratic side, it appears Hillary Clinton is going to get a bigger chunk of the delegates in that state than I thought. I had assumed that Obama, because of the urban black vote, would have a better chance of winning the district-level blowouts necessary to make even-numbered districts meaningful. But instead it was Hillary winning rural districts by enormous margins -- ratios of 2-to-1 or more in some cases -- while Obama was unable to do better than 61.5% in any district, and in fact only got majorities in seven of the state's 53 districts (and narrow pluralities in three or maybe four others).

After the jump, I crunch the numbers using the DNC allocation formula. The end result, as I suggest in the title of the post, is a delegate allocation of Clinton 207, Obama 163, give or take two or three delegates.

The Republicans' numbers are much easier to crunch, as they simply award each district's three delegates to the winner of the district. Looking at the GOP district-by-district results, it appears that McCain has won 48 of the 53 districts, with Romney apparently capturing CDs 21 and 52, and CDs 42, 49 and 50 too close to call (though McCain has a slim lead in all three). Romney was achingly close in a number of McCain's districts, but close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and Democratic primaries. So McCain comes away with, at a minimum, a whopping 144 district delegates, plus all 11 at-large delegates. Thus, the totals: McCain 155, Romney 6, with 9 undecided (but leaning McCain).

Again, after the jump, details on the Democratic allocations.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

The NYC medical examiner's office has ruled that Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.

A question

By Brendan Loy

If Barack Obama won more states and more delegates than Hillary Clinton yesterday, then how exactly did Clinton "win" Super Tuesday?

Just asking!

P.S. Oh, right, I forgot, she "won" because she captured the "big prizes," California, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Never mind that a) they're not really "big prizes" at all, because, like all Dem contests, their delegates are split proportionally; b) Clinton had massive, seemingly insurmountable leads in all three states a couple of weeks ago, and it's a testament to Obama's incredible surge of momentum that they were even in play; and c) the states' much-ballyhooed "symbolic significance" is, from beginning to end, an invention of the national media, which -- in gloriously circular fashion -- first decided that they were "symbolic" and then declared them "significant" on account of the aforementioned "symbolism" that it ascribed to them.

Knoxville's Super Tuesday in photos

By Brendan Loy

Here's my Super Tuesday photo gallery. And here are couple of pictures from it:

I also like this shot of a very lonely-looking Romney sign on the Kingston Pike. I think Mitt feels a bit like that sign after tonight's results.

These kids, by the way, are the Cedar Bluff Middle School Student Council members who were giving away free coffee and donuts to voters. I promised I'd put their picture on my website, so... there you, guys. Here's a larger version of the photo, and here's the full-size version.

Again, here's a link to the full gallery. It's two pages long, by the way, so don't miss page 2.

Super Duper wrap-up

By Brendan Loy

Josh Marshall sums things up, and does a far better job of it than the cable-news talking heads:

If you look at this from the vantage point of two weeks ago, it's a huge win for Obama, since he was trailing in states across the country by a very big margin. From the vantage point of the last couple days, however, it's much less clear. The hype of his momentum just got a bit out ahead of what he was able to pull off. And in that sense there's a very mild echo of New Hampshire, though the Clinton campaign is silly to claim some sort of comeback. There were a handful of states which, had he won two or more of them, would have taken him from a delegate tie to a decisive win that would have put Clinton seriously on the defensive. But it didn't happen. Not in New Jersey or Massachusetts and most importantly not in California, which Clinton won decisively.

But I think all these competing scenarios make one point clear. The only arguments for one side or the other being a winner here come down to airy and finally meaningless arguments about expectations. And the result tells a different tale. It's about delegates. It's dead even. You've got two well-funded candidates who've demonstrated an ability to power back from defeats. And neither is going anywhere.

The flip side of the proportional representation in delegates is that not only does it allow a challenger like Obama not to get put away early, it also makes it difficult to put away an opponent late. The conventional wisdom is that Obama will do well in this weekend's and next Tuesday's contests. But if he does, proportionality will reign there too. It's hard to see where this doesn't go all the way to the convention.

Indeed.

By the way, if you're looking for the Super Tuesday open thread, which I've bumped back down to its proper chronological place on the blog, here it is.

P.S. Another good wrap-up, courtesy of Matthew Yglesias:

The Obama campaign points out that their man won a majority of the states in play, which is certainly true. On the other hand, it's hard to argue that Utah, Idaho, and North Dakota are a better prize than New York and California. The bottom-line, however, is that if you factor out the more exuberant Zogby-fueled dreams of the weekend, Obama did quite well relative to his baseline of a week ago. The February 5 landscape favored Clinton, and Obama managed to not lose any of "his" states while poaching Connecticut and narrowly grabbing contested Missouri. Clinton won, but most indications are that she won't have won nearly enough delegates to put this thing out of reach. Now the landscape gets much more favorable for Obama.

This all goes back to Kos's "irrational exuberance" post. He was right.

As an aside, why does anyone even write about Zogby polls anymore? Isn't it a bit like basing weather forecasts on the Farmer's Almanac at this point?

P.P.S. Here are some more excellent observations, from TNR's Noam Scheiber, written a little earlier in the night but still essentially valid:

Obama is going to come out of tonight having won at least half of the states up for grabs, and very close to half the delegates, which either meets or exceeds the expectations for him going into today. So why do the cable pundits seem so down on him? (I actually heard Brit Hume concede that he'll probably have enough delegates to fight on after tonight. Probably?)

My sense is that this is almost entirely a function of the exit polls we in the media have been lathering ourselves in since 5:30 this evening. The polls showed Obama up in places like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Missouri, and Arizona, and many of us began to think Obama might even end the nomination fight tonight. When the actual numbers started pouring in, everyone was pretty wrong-footed.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is this: Exit polls aren't a reflection of on-the-ground reality. It's not as though Obama was actually up in all these places at 5 o'clock, and then Hillary, comeback kid that she is, reversed his charge and ground out a victory. The final results suggest he was never actually up in these places (certainly not by the margins the polls suggested.) It was a complete mirage.

Campaigns can be blamed for failing to manage expectations. But should they take the hit for the media's utter cluelessness at interpreting this data?

No. But they do. And Obama's Missouri "win" -- after the AP had called it for Clinton, then retracted the call -- came too late to reverse the P.R. damage to Obama. The die was already cast, the CW set in stone, by that point. Even though the CW itself was based on a reaction to a set of flawed, unweighted exit-poll numbers that were never discussed on-the-air. Pretty ridiculous all around.

P.P.P.S. On a more "micro" note, if I'm reading CNN's (weighted!) California exit poll correctly, African-Americans were only about 6% of the electorate!! Well, no wonder Obama lost. Sheesh. (Population-wise, California is roughly equal parts white, black and Hispanic.)

CORRECTION: That last sentence, which I've crossed out, is utterly false. I don't know where I got that idea; I thought I had read something along those lines years ago, and I swear I found something via Google last night (er, this morning) that backed it up, but I obviously must have misread it in the wee hours when I wrote this post. Anyway, I apologize for the error. California is right around 6% black, just as the turnout suggests, so the problem here was my own warped perceptions, not a low black turnout.

Prediction contest scenarios

By Brendan Loy

CNN just called Alaska for Romney. That clarifies things considerably in the Irish Trojan Super Tuesday Prediction Contests. The only remaining variables are the New Mexico Democratic primary, the Democrats Abroad caucuses (whose results won't be known until next week), and the delegate counts in California, both Republican and Democratic.

Here are the contest scenarios, subject to revision if I realize I screwed something up. :)

Combined contest

It's a two-man battle between Joe Loy and Ben Brown. Loy wins if Clinton wins New Mexico or Obama wins the Democrats Abroad caucuses; Brown wins only if Obama wins New Mexico and Clinton wins the Democrats Abroad.

Republican contest

It's a four-way tie between Andrew Bottom, Marty West, Joe Loy, and Tim. The tiebreaker is who comes closest to correctly predicting John McCain's share of the 170 pledged California delegates. Bottom said McCain will get 87 delegates; West said 88; Loy said 98; and Tim said 110.

Democratic contest

If Clinton wins New Mexico, Sam Cialek and Joe Loy are tied for first place, and will stay that way. But if Clinton then wins the Democrats Abroad caucuses, which continue through next week, Ben Brown can join Cialek and Loy to finish in a three-way tie. The tie would be broken by calculating who is closer to Hillary Clinton's total number of pledged California delegates out 370 (Cialek said 170, Loy said 190, Brown said 191). If, on the other hand, Obama wins the Democrats Abroad caucus after Clinton wins NM, it'll just be a two-way tie between Cialek and Loy (to be settled by the same tiebreaker).

If Obama wins New Mexico, Brown will take sole possession of the lead, but will need Clinton to win the Democrats Abroad caucus in order to maintain sole possession. If Obama wins the Democrats Abroad caucus after Obama wins NM, then Brown falls back into a three-way tie with Cialek and Loy, to be settled by the aforementioned delegate tiebreaker.

Complete current standings after the jump.

Clinton has tiny popular-vote edge

By Brendan Loy

With 76 percent of the precincts reporting nationwide, the combined Super Duper Tuesday popular vote count, according to CNN, is:

Clinton 5,763,143
Obama 5,687,890

Wow. That's damn close. (It's also damn meaningless. But yay! Numbers! Numbers are fun!)

And on the Republican side:

McCain 3,027,772
Romney 2,346,943
Huckabee 1,604,010
Paul 315,691

Obama wins Missouri!

By Brendan Loy

So says CNN.

"Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will emerge with plenty of delegates from Missouri," Wolf Blitzer points out, "but at the same time, Barack Obama will have bragging rights that he carried this bellweather state."

The news of his victory comes so late, though, I'm not sure how significant those "bragging rights" really are. Most viewers have already gone to bed; tomorrow's newspapers are already going to print. Aren't we officially past the point where the CW -- "Obama did well enough to stay alive, but Clinton won all the big states, so she 'won' Super Tuesday, but the delegates will be close and the race remains up in the air" -- has already become cemented into place? I'm not sure an objectively-almost-meaningless-anyway 8,000-vote victory in the Show-Me State is going to change anything.

UPDATE: After the jump, the updated prediction contest standings, with only Alaska (GOP), New Mexico (Dem), and Democrats Abroad still outstanding.

Winners and losers

By Brendan Loy

In addition to the California call noted below, CNN has declared McCain the GOP's Missouri winner, and has retracted its call that Clinton won the Democratic race there; the latter is too close to call, and Obama has a slim lead.

Combined with all the other projections and results, that leaves only Alaska (GOP), Missouri (Dems), New Mexico (Dems) and the Democrats Abroad undecided. Elsewhere, the winners are:

OBAMA: Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, Utah

CLINTON: American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee


MCCAIN: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma

ROMNEY: Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Utah, North Dakota
HUCKABEE: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, West Virginia

As for the Irish Trojan Super Tuesday Prediction Contest... Andrew Bottom and Marty West are currently tied for first place on the GOP side, and will stay that way regardless of the Alaska result. But if Romney wins Alaska, Joe Loy [UPDATE: and Tim] will join them in first place. Either way, the tie will be settled by the California delegate tiebreaker. Bottom said McCain would get 87 delegates; West, 88; Loy, 98. [UPDATE: Tim, 110.]

There are too many variables to project winners in the Democratic or overall races yet, but Loy currently has the overall lead by one point, and is tied for first with Sam Cialek and Ben Brown in the Dem contest. Complete standings after the jump.

UPDATE: Okay, I ran some scenarios for the Democratic contest. Only the current co-leaders and Clete Andrews are still alive to win. Cialek and Loy will finish tied with each other no matter what. But Brown can pass them if Obama wins New Mexico and Clinton wins the Democrats Abroad; if only one of those things happens, he'll finish tied with them; if neither happens, he'll finish behind both of them. Meanwhile, Clete Andrews will finish tied for first if Obama wins Missouri and Clinton wins the Democrats Abroad. Any tie would then be broken by the California delegate tiebreaker. Cialek predicted that Clinton will get 170 delegtes; Andrews, 180; Loy, 190; and Brown, 191.

CORRECTION: My mistake. Andrews is already eliminated. I had messed up the spreadsheet, failing to include Obama's Alaska win.

UPDATE 2: In the combined contest, the Missouri Democratic primary doesn't matter. It's all about New Mexico (Dems), Alaska (GOP), and the Democrats abroad. If Obama wins New Mexico and Clinton wins the Democrats Abroad, Ben Brown will win outright. Assuming at least one of those two things doesn't happen, then if anyone other than McCain wins Alaska, Joe Loy will win outright; if McCain wins Alaska, it'll be a three-way tie between Loy, Andrew Bottom and Brendan Loy.

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain will win California primaries, CNN projects.