Montana and South Dakota

Finally! The last primaries. The consensus seems to be that Obama wins both of them. But recent South Dakota polls show otherwise. Obama will win Montana by 10 points, and Clinton will win South Dakota by 2 points. Obama currently needs 40 delegates and will win 17 pledged delegates tonight. He'll also pick up 5 superdelegates from Montana, as they have pledged themselves to the winner of the state. He'll need 18 superdelegates to commit today if we wants to declare himself the winner tonight. I think he'll get them by the time he speaks tonight. He'll make that point subtly clear tonight. Hillary will wake up tomorrow with only a floor fight at the convention to give her hope. But it's pretty clear she'll lose that fight. She should concede on Wednesday, but she may just suspend her campaign. A suspension makes it easier for her to continue raising money while not spending any of it. But I don't think she'll be able to raise a whole lot of money. She'll raise the kind of money a Senate candidate might raise, not the kind a Presidential candidate would. But that might get her close to being out of debt.

Update: FiveThirtyEight has Obama winning by 18 in Montana and 5 in South Dakota. They've been pretty accurate so far with their combined demographics and polling model. Given the sparsity of polls for the states, they should do a lot better than the traditional polling methods. So it may not be wise to go against their predictions. I'm still sticking with my prediction, however. The reason is that Hillary's supporters are desperate now and will turn out in full force. Obama's supporters already know he's going to win the nomination, so they'll stay home in droves. If Hillary had a realistic chance, I'd go with FiveThirtyEight's predictions, but she doesn't.