How Many Delegates Can Clinton Win Tomorrow?

Current polls have Clinton expected to win West Virginia by a huge margin, perhaps by 30% to 40% statewide.

West Virginia has 28 pledged delegates up for grabs, and the Clinton campaign is hoping a blowout victory can help close the pledged delegate gap and make their case to the superdelegates even stronger.

But how will the West Virginia delegates be allocated?

According to Green Papers, 18 of the 28 pledged delegates will be awarded on a district level, seven will be awarded based on statewide performance as At-Large Pledged Delegates and three more will be assigned Pledged LEOs.

The 18 pledged delegates assigned by district will be broken up into six pledged delelgates for each of the state's three congressional districts.

This allocation of a large, even number of delegates per district contest is a negative feature for the Clinton campaign.

In Texas, which had several districts with six or more delegates, the threshold required to capture a large majority of in-district delegates is much higher than in a district with only four delegates, for example.

According to the Texas Primary Delegate Calculator, this is what happens:

For a candidate to win all six delegates, the opponent must fail to clear the 15% viability threshold in the district. Obama will certainly carry this low bar of viability.

To win 5-1, a candidate must win by a 75% to 50% margin. There are other nuances when there are more than two candidates, but for this contest between Clinton and Obama, Clinton must capture 3/4 of the votes in a congressional district to win a 5-1 victory in pledged delegates. Again, Obama may be in a bit of danger of not reaching this 25% threshold, but most likely he will clear it in each district.

A 4-2 victory would mean that Senator Clinton would have to take in between 58.5% and 75% of the vote in the district. This is the most likely scenario to occur for each of the three districts, which means that Clinton would carry 12 of 18 pledged delegates allocated by district.

It might be possible, though for Obama to keep Clinton under 58.5% in at least one district, which would force a 3-3 split of the delegates. If that were to happen in just one district, the final outcome of the district-level pledged delegates would be 11-7, only a four delegate advantage for Clinton.

Throw in a 7-3 split at most for the at-large delegates, and perhaps even a 6-4 split if Obama does a bit better than current polling, and you could see in the best case scenario for Obama a 17-11 split of pledged delegates. Best case scenario for the Clinton campaign will be a 19-9 split, perhaps even a 20-8 split if a district goes over 75% for her.

Obama's lead in pledged delegates will most certainly stay above 150 after tomorrow, as it currently is 164.