The Math Strategy

The new media message about Obama is that he is pursuing a "math strategy." Apparently, in his efforts to reach the 2025 delegates needed to secure the nomination, Barack Obama is focusing too much energy on math.

You see, Obama's delegate lead today is actually larger than it was before Clinton's wins in Texas and Ohio. In fact, even with a big win in Pennsylvania, there is basically no way for Clinton to catch Obama in terms of pledged delegates. Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe: "As the number of remaining pledged delegates dwindles, Hillary Clinton's path to the nomination seems less and less plausible."

While Plouffe’s point is unarguably true, that’s not what the media focuses on.

Here's Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post:

The danger for the Obama campaign -- as we've written before -- is that math is not a message. Process arguments about the number of pledged delegates each campaign has won may well be effective for the inside-the-Beltway crowd but they aren't likely to move the needle with average voters.

Boy oh boy, Chris gets this so wrong. Obama’s message to average voters has nothing to do with delegate counts. You don’t see any references to this sort of thing in his ads, or his speeches or his direct mail. Obama’s message to “average voters” is about change, and hope and all that, not about math or delegates.

But here’s the thing. At the end of this process, when all the “average voters” have cast their ballots, who is actually going to decide the outcome? Not average voters. Superdelegates will. And how might you describe a large majority of those superdelegates? I don’t know, maybe as part of an “inside-the-Beltway crowd.”

Obama isn’t pushing his “math strategy” as some sort of new overarching campaign message (“Delegate Leads We Can Believe In”). He’s trying to lay out the case for why superdelegates should ultimately choose him over his opponent.

I think there is something a bit strange about the fact that the media is so dismissive of the mathematical realities of this race. At the end of the day, whatever you think about the Democratic nomination process, it's always been about who can get to 2025. Just as the general election is about getting to 270, a math strategy is really the only strategy.