Political prognostication is fun and foolish.   I don't mind playing the fool, though.  After reading the DNC staff analysis regarding Michigan and Florida and several other diaries on DKos I am prepared to make the following predictions (for entertainment purposes only).  Take it for what its worth (not much) and I would love to hear your thoughts.  

Back in March Lanny Davis compared Rev. Wright to a member of the KKK.  In April he said Howard Dean should resign if he had anything to do with nixing the North Carolina debate.  Last week Johh Marshall inducted Davis into the Fox News Liberal Media Bias Cult.  But today Davis may have reached a new low with his thinly veiled threat to seek to delegitimize Obama's nomination unless not only are Michigan and Florida seated fully, but Clinton gets at least half of the 55 delegates assigned to uncommitted by the Michigan primary.  

The dissent opens with these harsh words:

The power of a state to regulate and control the basic social relationship of marriage of its domiciliaries is here challenged and set at nought by a majority order of this court arrived at not by a concurrence of reasons but by the end result of four votes supported by divergent concepts not supported by authority and in fact contrary to the decisions in this state and elsewhere.

The three member minority of the California Supreme Court lashed out at the judicial activism of the four member majority for changing the way marriage had always been in California.   But that wasn't today's marriage case.  It was the case of Perez v. Sharp from 60 years ago in which a 4-3 decision of the California Supreme Court made it the first court in the land to declare that the state could not constitutionally prohibit interracial marriages.

This weekend the states of Colorado, Kansas, and Nevada hold their state conventions.  In terms of pledged delegates, based on earlier caucus results Obama is expected to take 36/55 in Colorado, 23/32 in Kansas, and 13/25 in Nevada.  Three things to watch for this weekend at these conventions:

The media now seems to be pressing Clinton's surrogates hard to wake up to the mathematical reality that most of us saw months ago, that the delegate math is insurmountable.  Clinton needs to either win over a large number of superdelegates who already committed to Obama, or else win the undeclared superdelegates by at least a 3 to 1 margin.  Reality says any such massive shift of superdelegate allegiance will be towards the candidate the voters chose, not away from it.  So what is their response now?  All of that math is meaningless because it doesn't count Michigan and Florida.  They hope that by getting into an argument over what happened or will happen in Michigan in Florida they can create enough confusion to lead people to believe that really Clinton might have a chance.  I'm not going to get into that argument.  Instead I'm going to show that even if you do count Michigan and Flordia, Obama is still the nominee.

When will the Democratic nomination battle end?  Five possible times jump out: (1) Shortly after next Tuesday's (May 6) contests in Indiana and North Carolina, (2) Shortly after the May 20 contests in Oregon and Kentucky.  (3) Shortly after the last primaries (June 3) in Montana and South Dakota.  (4) Shortly after the last delegates are officially selected (June 22). (5) At the convention in Denver.  In this diary I want to look at the delegate numbers to see how these scenarios might play out.  I'll be using numbers from Obama's campaign results center but these actually tend to be more reliable than most media organizations.

Much has been made of Hillary Clinton's recent comments recent remarks that "There is no such thing as a pledged delegate."  She also is reported to have claimed that the term "pledged delegate" was a "misnomer."  I have seen a few pundits and reporters say that Clinton's claim is technically true.  It's not.  It's a flat out lie.

Some of you may remember that in the early morning hours of February 6 (the morning after Super Duper Tuesday) the Obama campaign "inadvertently" attached an excel spreadsheet that contained their projections on the pledged delegate count for the previous night's contests and all remaining contests.  

``This is only one of an infinite number of scenarios,'' Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said. He added that the information was released unintentionally.

Still I thought it might be fun to revisit those projections three weeks later after eleven more contests...

UPDATE (1:20 PM PST):  Thanks to Searching for Pericles I updated the Tennessee numbers giving one more delegate to Clinton (and one less to Obama).

Courtesy of an AP Tally we get the following result for pledged delegates accumulated in the primaries and caucuses held last Tuesday (pledged delegates to date).

Kerry:  144 (176)
Edwards: 66 (84)
Clark: 50  (50)
Dean: 7  (15)
Sharpton: 2 (2)

I do believe this is an accurate account.  The Sharpton numbers seem surprising, but it does seem he won a delegate in Delaware and one in South Carolina.  Earlier counts don't reflect this because they were missing some precincts in SC's 6th CD where Sharpton did strong.  

So at this point Kerry has won just over half of the pledged delegates available.  At this pace he would need the assistance of superdelegates to win the nomination.

Last night, I criticized CNN for awarding Sharpton a pledged DE delegate.  While they deserve criticism for much of their coverage, in that case they were right and I was wrong.  I was basing my information on The Green Papers which said that all of Delaware's 15 delegates were chosen based on the statewide vote.  That is incorrect.  Fortunately they link to a .pdf file of the actual selection plan.  It turns out the City of Wilmington gets to choose 2 delegates.  

The state of Delaware has election results by (state rep.) district.  From what I can tell the city of Wilmington covers exactly the first four state districts. What follows is based on that info. Adding up the totals we see that there were 4616 votes cast in Wilmington.  So a candidate needed 693 votes to meet the 15% threshold there.  Two candidates did that. Sharpton with 709 and Kerry with 2097.  Thus there were 2806 qualifying votes.  Kerry wins the first delegate (1403 votes) with 694 remaining votes. So Sharpton wins the other delegate!  If Sharpton had won a mere 10 less votes in Wilmington there would have been a tie for that delegate.  With 11 less votes, Kerry wins the delegate outright.

So  CNN is awarding one of Delawares pledged delegates to Al Sharpton with 6% of the vote.  I'm sure he thanks them, but somehow I don't think CNN has that power.

UPDATE (10:40pm):  Wolf Blitzer just announced on TV that Sharpton won a delegate in Delaware.  Doesn't anybody there realize that's a computer error?  I tell my students that when using a computer, one should check to see if the answer makes sense.  Nobody taught that to the folks at CNN.