![]() ![]() After Super Tuesday on March 1, Clinton had a lead of 191 pledged delegates, and it never dropped below 187 pledged delegates the rest of the way:īetting markets, although not a perfect measure, also remained extremely confident about Clinton’s chances from start to finish. But she regained the pledged delegate lead after Nevada and never looked back. She trailed Sanders in pledged delegates only once, after Sanders won New Hampshire early on. By contrast, a team that trailed at halftime but eventually wins by 21 points after piling on in the fourth quarter won’t be considered all that dominant.īy this measure, Clinton was quite dominant. For instance, if Michigan State goes up two touchdowns early in a game against Ohio State, and Ohio State never makes it any closer than that, Michigan State will get a high game-control score even if they eventually win by “only” 17 points. College football stat geeks are fond of a concept called game control, which reflects how dominant the winning team was from start to finish. And her 12-point margin over Sanders is roughly average, instead of below average.īut the calculation also potentially overstates the closeness of the Democratic race. Measured in this way, the 55 percent of the popular vote she received is tied for third-most out of 16 nominees, after Al Gore in 2000 and Bob Dole in 1996. Hillary Clinton’s performance is more impressive on this basis, given that Sanders contested the race to the end. Which nominees were dominating when their top opponent quit? Paul Tsongas was second in the popular vote to Bill Clinton when Tsongas dropped out in mid-March 1992, for example, so we’ll consider the race to have ended there, even though Jerry Brown continued a quixotic bid against Clinton and eventually lapped Tsongas into second. So we can rerun the previous table, this time freezing the numbers if and when the second-place candidate dropped out after Super Tuesday. (Then again, as I’ll argue later, Sanders never had much of a chance, either, after Super Tuesday.) Because of Republicans’ winner-take-all rules, McCain didn’t stand much chance of a comeback. At the time McCain dropped out, Bush led the popular vote only 51-43, less than the margin by which Clinton beat Sanders. Bush’s performance in the 2000 primary, it at first appears utterly dominant: He won 62 percent of the popular vote and beat his nearest rival, John McCain, by 31 percentage points.īut McCain dropped out of the race relatively early, after losing seven of nine states on Super Tuesday. That potentially understates Clinton’s performance, however, because Sanders never dropped out when a lot of other candidates in his position did, allowing the eventual nominee to run up the score in uncontested races. Sources: The Green Papers, Rhodes Cook, US Election Atlas, Wikipedia Which candidates dominated their nomination races? Her 12-point margin of victory over her nearest opponent, Sanders, is below-average. The 55 percent of the popular vote she received is somewhat above average, in comparison to other open nomination races 2 since 1972. By the standard of a primary, however, Clinton’s performance was more pedestrian. Eisenhower’s over Adlai Stevenson in 1952, for example, when Eisenhower won the Electoral College 442-89. If Clinton had won by that sort of margin in a general election, we’d call it a landslide her margin over Sanders was similar to Dwight D. According to The Green Papers, Clinton won 16.8 million votes to 13.2 million for Sanders, or about 55 percent of the vote to his 43 percent, a 12 percentage point gap. There’s also that sticky question of how to count superdelegates.Īn alternative is to look at the aggregate popular vote, which makes for easier comparisons to past elections. As FiveThirtyEight contributor Daniel Nichanian pointed out, Clinton would have had a gargantuan win in pledged delegates - perhaps in excess of 1,000 delegates more than Sanders - if the Democratic nomination had been contested under Republican primary rules, which are winner take all or winner take most in many states. But delegates don’t make for easy historical comparisons because the rules for delegate allocation change from party to party and election to election. Delegates might seem like the logical starting point Clinton beat Sanders by 359 pledged delegates, and 884 delegates overall (counting superdelegates). There’s no agreed-upon standard for determining whether a nomination campaign was close or lopsided. ![]()
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