Also In This Issue Related stories: The Art Of Wooing • The K-Street Superdelegates

By Corine Hegland, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 22, 2008

Adding up superdelegates conjures uncomfortable memories of struggling with first-grade math worksheets. Your addition and subtraction skills might be firmer now, but good luck getting your answers to match everyone else's.

Here's the basic math.

Come August, 4,050 delegates will attend the Democratic National Convention, assuming that Michigan and Florida's delegates are not seated. Eighty percent of the total are pledged to vote for one candidate or another, according to their state's primary and caucus results. The remaining 19.7 percent, or 797, are superdelegates who are free to vote for anybody. (Technically, the party has 795 superdelegates right now because of the deaths of Reps. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., and Julia Carson, D-Ind., but expected victories in upcoming special elections will push the total back up to 797 before the convention.)

To win the nomination, a candidate needs a simple majority of delegates, or 2,026 votes. Two-thirds of the 3,253 pledged delegates have been selected, giving Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., 1,178 votes and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., 1,024, according to the Associated Press. To reach the magic threshold of 2,026 without relying on superdelegates means that Obama would need to win nearly 83 percent of the remaining 1,025 delegates, while Clinton would need 98 percent.

Unless one of the candidates has one helluva skeleton in the closet, neither is going to achieve that kind of blowout. As a result, the unpledged 19.7 percent of the vote -- the superdelegates -- will come into play.

About half of them have already given their support to one candidate or the other, splitting roughly 60 percent for Clinton and 40 percent for Obama. Nobody, however, agrees on the exact count. And the pledged superdelegates aren't legally bound to stay with their initial choice. Like a school of fish, they could suddenly move in a different direction.

As of February 20, Clinton had 238 superdelegates to Obama's 173, according to AP. CBS News gave Clinton 228 and Obama 169, while CNN had Clinton with 234 to Obama's 161. An independent website, Democratic Convention Watch, gives Clinton 238 superdelegates and 167.5 to Obama.

The different numbers stem from different survey methods. Both campaigns maintain their own counts of superdelegates, of course, but political reporters say that the candidates' tallies tend to be somewhat inflated.

AP, whose numbers are the most widely distributed, relies on comprehensive telephone surveys. AP reporters in every state capital have conducted three rounds of calls to the superdelegates from their respective states. Each survey tends to reach about 95 percent of the superdelegates, according to Stephen Ohlemacher, the national reporter running AP's delegate count.

In between surveys, the numbers are adjusted whenever a superdelegate makes a public endorsement. Ohlemacher says that AP will continue checking with individual uncommitted superdelegates on a weekly basis and, at some point, will run another comprehensive survey to see whether anybody has quietly changed his or her mind. AP's most recent survey uncovered three former Clinton supporters who decided to switch to "undecided" after Super Tuesday.

CBS's numbers come from its own phone polls, which it has conducted in conjunction with The New York Times since the 1980s. According to Kathleen Frankovic, CBS News's director of surveys, the network has made three rounds of calls for the 2008 race and conducts follow-up interviews with individual superdelegates "as campaign events warrant." Like AP, CBS adjusts its counts to reflect confirmed public endorsements.

CNN's count stems from a combination of telephone calls to superdelegates, public endorsements, and the lists provided by the campaigns. It has not done the kind of comprehensive baseline surveys that CBS and AP have, but it does place rolling calls to superdelegates as events warrant.

Democratic Convention Watch, or DemConWatch, relies entirely on public information to arrive at its counts. Tom and Matt, a couple of computer geeks with a side interest in politics, became frustrated with the lack of transparency behind the media's numbers, so in January they published a list of the superdelegates on their website and started tracking endorsements themselves. Each candidate's superdelegate supporters are listed by name with a link to the press release or news story announcing their backing.

Until recently, DemConWatch was the only organization that publicly named the individual superdelegates in each camp, which made it a hit with political junkies. Its readership jumped from about 200 or 300 visits a day before it started reporting on the superdelegates to about 25,000 visits daily now, according to Tom. (Because their day jobs are unrelated to politics, Tom asked that his and Matt's last names be withheld.) The site is updated daily, fed by the pair's reading of the news and confirmation of reader tips on new or withdrawn endorsements.