More and more delegates, another super and the Iowa cache

Over the weekend saw the Obama campaign gather in 13 delegates (some say 9 but officially it is 13) moving his current take from the Iowa convention process to 29 from a previous 16. These delegates were chosen at their Congressional District Conventions where Edwards lost all but 4 of his delegates at this round. In June 16 more at-large delegates will be chosen at their state convention where it is expected that Obama should gather a majority from there.

Futhermore Obama added another superdelegate, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) in an announcement today. This places the post PA primary haul of 5 to 2 (actually one was an Add-On's, Kathy Sullivan (D-NH), while Obama gathered endorsements from Charlene Fernandez (D-AZ) their Attorney General over the weekend. All told Obama now holds 236 superdelegates to Clinton's 257.

This leads me to my final analysis: I currently figure that Obama has 1498 hard count pledged delegates in his stable, and additional 236 superdelegates adding up to 1734 hard count delegates. That is 291 short of 2025. Also Axelrod's conservative projections hold that Obama is expected to gather another 208 pledged delegates through the remaining contests. This places the count down to 83. There are 64 remaining Add-On's where Politico projections have it that Obama will gather an estimated 38, dropping the number down to 45 delegates.

Parsing further one can state that there are those 16 remaining Iowa delegates, just calculate that there is an 8 to 8 split, this brings the number down to 37. Edwards still holds 18 delegates who by all accounts are superdelegates, calculate a split there, 9 to 9. Now the figure falls to 29. Then there is the announced unofficial superdelegates like Carter and Harkin, they number 6 that state they will vote for who holds the largest number of pledged delegates and the number drops to 23. Further examination and there are lose delegates in caucus states like Kansas, Colorado, Minnesota, Idaho and Utah where Obama won by overwhelming numbers, one can speculate that he could pick up an additional 4 in these remaining procedural contests. This then drops the superdelegate need to below 20.

Watch the superdelegate count, there are 6 supposedly about to commit for Obama in North Carolina and a couple more in Indiana, where suddenly a new pundit will do the same math as I did and determine that Obama is within reach of clinching the nomination.