Obama Camp to Clinton: It’s All Over Now

Polls are a-tightening in Texas and Ohio, but the increasingly confident Obamaphites say they’ve got this thing in the bag and they’re heading to the house, as indicated in the memo below from O’s campaign manager.

If I were Clinton, I’d bang the gong on this, charging Obama with overconfidence, cockiness, arrogance and other unsaintly character flaws. The memo may be accurate, but it seems early, and risky, to start the victory lap the day before the vote.

TO: Interested Parties

From: David Plouffe, Campaign Manager, Obama for America

RE: The Real Meaning of March 4th

By their own clear definition of where they expected and believed they needed to be after Ohio and Texas, the Clinton campaign will fall terribly short on March 4th. The Obama pledged delegate lead stands at 162. The question for the Clinton campaign if they do not significantly erode that lead on Tuesday is what plausible path they have to even up the pledged delegates in the remaining contests.

There are 611 pledged delegates left after March 4th’s contests. They would need to win at least 62% of all remaining pledged delegates to get back to even. And while they have often talked about Pennsylvania – where public polls show their lead deteriorating rapidly – the Wyoming caucuses on March 8th and Mississippi primary or March 11th could potentially result in more pledged delegates netted to the winner than on March 4th.

So it is clear that narrow popular vote wins in Texas and Ohio will do very little to improve their nearly impossible path to the nomination. If they do not win Texas and Ohio by healthy double digit margins – and they led by healthy double digit margins as recently as two weeks ago – they will be facing almost impossible odds to reverse the delegate math.

While the Clintons gamely continue to try to move the goal posts, at some point there has to be a reckoning. It is a very simple question – what is their path to secure the nomination? No amount of spin can change the math. We look forward to their tortured answers on Wednesday morning.

The Clinton campaign has insisted that this is a race about delegates. And we agree. The tale of March 4th is not who wins what states but where the delegate battle stands after all the delegate yield for all four of these contests have been allocated.