The three targets for Clinton to secure the nomination

How Clinton gets Sanders to concede is becoming quite an issue. There are now three seperate targets being bandied about for what she needs to achieve to win. They are:

A majority of all delegates, including super delegates

This is the normal target. There are 4,763 delegates. You need 2,383 to win. Clinton has 2,293 so she needs just 90 more out of the 939 remaining. She will obviously do this. This will however not occur until June 7 as only 79 delegates come up before then.

A majority of pledged delegates

Some in the Sanders camp say that it isn’t over until someone has a majority of pledged delegates. There are 4,051 pledged delegates. A majority is 2,026. Clinton has 1,768 so she needs 258 more out of 781 remaining. That’s just 33% of remaining delegates which is easy to achieve. This will also happen on June 7 as after that only DC remains on June 14,

A majority of all delegates, but counting pledged delegates also

Again some in Sanders camps says that as super delegates may change their mind, then unless Clinton can get a majority of all delegates, just with pledged delegates, then it is a contested convention. They say until the first vote you don’t know what they’ll do.

This is nonsense as 550 senior Democrats aren’t suddenly going to renege on their written statements and suddenly vote for Sanders. But Sanders can argue it is mathematically possible so hence he won’t concede. This will put pressure on Clinton to adopt more of his policies.

So by this argument Clinton needs 2,383 to clinch it pre-convention and you can only count the 1,768 to date she has pledged. So she needs to win 615 of the remaining 781 pledged delegates. That clearly won’t happen, so if that is Sanders line, he won’t concede.

In reality it will all be over on 7th of June. It effectively is over now.