Bernie Sanders’ Path to Victory All Hinges on This One Chart


For those of you wondering how well Bernie Sanders did last night, here’s a table that you might want to keep handy. It’s from Nate Silver, and it shows how big a margin Bernie needs in the remaining states to catch up with Hillary and get a majority of pledged delegates. In Wisconsin, for example, he needed to win by 16 points, but he won by only 13 14 points and picked up 47 48 delegates instead of the 50 he needed:

Roughly speaking, Bernie broke even yesterday. He’ll need to do this well or better in every future election. In any case, this is a good table to keep at hand for upcoming primaries. It gives you an idea of how big a victory Bernie needs in order to catch up with Hillary. Anything less is basically a setback; anything more is a victory.

NOTE: I excerpted the table to include only the states with more than 50 delegates. The full table is at the link.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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