Bill Press: Media is wrong: Dem race isn’t over

First rule of politics: The media always gets it wrong. 

After Hillary Clinton lost the New Hampshire primary by 22 points, most political reporters opined it would soon be all over for Queen Hillary.

{mosads}Flash forward. After Bernie Sanders lost South Carolina by nearly 50 points, most reporters echoed Politico’s headline “Bernie’s revolution hits a wall,” predicting the imminent end of the Vermont challenger’s campaign. 

In both cases, the media got it wrong. 

Maybe someone should remind the press, as Clinton once tried to do: After New Hampshire, only two states had held primaries or caucuses. There were still 48 to go. After South Carolina, as Sanders would be the first to point out, there are 46 states to go. And 11 of them vote today, Super Tuesday, on the Democratic side: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia, plus U.S. territory American Samoa. 

Now, some say it doesn’t matter that Sanders suffered such a lopsided loss on Saturday, because South Carolina will definitely vote Republican in November. 

But they’re wrong. 

Clinton’s overwhelming win in the Palmetto State does matter, because it gives her a lot of momentum heading into Super Tuesday — and because it underscores Sanders’s difficulty in appealing to African-American voters.

But — hear this, everybody — South Carolina was not the end of the Sanders campaign. Far from it. 

Check the arithmetic on Super Tuesday. For Democrats, there are 12 contests with a total of 865 pledged delegates at stake. However, unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party does not use a winner-take-all system. Delegates are awarded on a proportional basis, in proportion to the share of the vote total in the primary or caucuses, as long as a candidate scores at least 15 percent of the vote. This means Sanders doesn’t have to win in every state. He only needs to rack up a big enough margin to keep winning delegates — just like Barack Obama did against Clinton in 2008.

On Super Tuesday, the Independent senator is projected to win as many as five states: Vermont, Massachusetts, Colorado, Oklahoma and Minnesota, for a total of 288 pledged delegates. He also has good odds of winning or scoring big in Maine on March 6; Michigan on March 8; Ohio and Illinois on March 15; New York on April 19; and California’s big cache of 475 pledged delegates on June 7. 

In other words, Sanders is in it for the long slog, as long as he doesn’t run out of money, which, with more than 1 million donors at an average $30 contribution, he won’t.

For Sanders, there is, however, one potential problem: the Democratic Party’s superdelegates. These 712 party poobahs can vote for anybody they want, and most of them are now supporting the former first lady. In theory, if Sanders gets close to the 2,382 delegates necessary to win, they could steal the nomination from him and throw it to Clinton. But that’s unlikely to happen, or open revolt would follow. 

Bottom line: Just look at the arithmetic. This Democratic primary is far from over. 

Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of “Buyer’s Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down.”