So I decided to make a thread to breakdown where each candidate stands. Luckily 538 has made a super simple graph to illustrate this, and has created 2 separate paths to the nomination for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Hillary Clinton at the top, Bernie below her: http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/...ets/democrats/
For those who aren't clicking the link -- 538 has made projections of where candidates should do well/bad and has said basically "these demopgrahics for this state favor this candidate, they should win this many delegates from this state because of it". It was last updated 9 hours from now, and it doesn't include ANY delegates from Missouri yet.
So there's been a lot of talk about "Sanders has a lot of favorable states to come", that is true. And 538 has worked that into their paths to the nomination.
According to 538 w/o Missouri Clinton is at 108% of her delegate target and Bernie Sanders is at 83% of his target.
The path that has been shaped out for Clinton involves doing below 50%, in some cases 40% in some of the upcoming states to hit her targets for those days. Meaning for her to not hit her targets, she will need less than 40% of the vote in most of the upcoming states.
Likewise for Bernie, since he is below his target, he needs to hit above 55-60% in most of the upcoming states that favor him to get back on track for the nomination.
Going forward, Clinton can win below 50% in a lot of the upcoming contests and still secure the nomination, ESPECIALLY since she is so much above her goal (especially once they add missouri). She has hit her goal in almost all the states and went way past it in many.
Basically, the wins that Sanders will have, according to 538 are already baked into their model -- Meaning she can lost a lot of upcoming contests and still walk away the Nominee.
Right now, Clinton is on a path to the nomination, with needing less than 50% of delegates from a lot of the upcoming contests, and about 50% or a little more from some to hit the magic number.
Bernie Sanders however needs to exceed all of his targets by a good margin to win. So he's already favored to win a majority of upcoming states, most of the smaller ones, he now needs to exceed those targets that already have him winning 55-60% of the state and win MORE delegates, or else he just can't get the nom.
TLDR: Clinton is on a good path to the nomination with not needing to actually win a majority of remaining states (she needs to pull out wins in most of the big ones remaining, where she is favored however, they can even be close wins). And Sanders needs big wins in every single upcoming contest, no more tie business. A tie is a win for Hillary. Everytime he ties means he has less room to make up his deficit.
-----------------------------------------------------------Upcoming Contests---------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are 8 upcoming contests that total 373 delegates. Clintons total goal for all of these? Only 161. Meaning she can win less than half (and she'll probably win in Arizona) to be remain ahead of her path to the nomination.
For Sanders, it's not simple math. Because he can't just HIT his goals, he needs to start exceeding them or he can't win. So yes he's probably going to win 7 out of 8 states, but the problem is even if he wins 50-55% of all of them and loses arizona by like 55-45, he ends up still being behind his overall goal, which is a problem.
Then on April 19th will be NY, Sanders needs a landslide victory to start cutting into her lead, or else he's really going to have a problem. The next 9 contests including NY will almost determine the race, if he isn't exceeding his targets in every single state including NY, the math will only become harder and harder.