Someone needs to buy Hillary a copy of that book, "He's Just Not That Into You."

Can someone give me a quick idea of how the pledged delegates are awarded on the democratic side? I've been following all of this and it's obvious they they are not 'winner take all.' Are they given based on the percentage of voters who voted for a particular candidate - ie: Obama took 58% of the vote in WI, ergo he gets 58% of WI's delegates?

I have reached a conclusion over the question of whether to include super-delegates in these counts: the numbers of pledged delegates, sans the supers, are what ought to be reported. If, after that initial count, a network wishes to include those supers that have stated their support for a candidate it would also be somewhat informative to include those numbers but they ought to be reported separately and secondarily to the pledged counts.

Why? For starters the name given to pledged delegates is perfectly descriptive - the number of them that will vote for the candidate other than the one they are pledged to, if any, will be insignificant. The idea that a candidate will convince some of the other's to change their vote is downright silly. The delegates are chosen for the role on the basis of extreme loyalty to the candidate. When supers, on the other hand, are included in a candidate's delegate count it is based on having expressed or having made a declaration of support for them at one point in the past. As Mr. Lewis demonstrated they can change their minds right up to the moment they cast their vote; several have already. This being the case, why include them in the count? They're not a sure thing.

That's the most straightforward and simple reasoning behind my conclusion on this issue but there is another and it has greater significance for what decisions the supers will make. Not only does it speak to the question at hand, it gets to the heart of the matter of whether, if one candidate has a strong lead in pledged delegates coming into the nomination, the supers will be as big of a distortion in the nominating process as people are saying. The arguments and ideas that Josh laid out in his post, "Won't Go There" on Feb. 15th, were very similar to what I had been thinking, albeit more thoroughly considered and refined (I highly recommend reading that if you hadn't, the best writing on the super-delegate issue I've seen). Even if all the current supers stay with the candidate that they've come out in support of in the past, which as I wrote above is unlikely to be the case, about half of them haven't made an endorsement. The candidate with the most delegates has the most support; that's what they'll want in a candidate. Furthermore, if one candidate has leads in the popular vote, pledged delegates, number of contests won, money raised, support among swing and first-time voters, support in purple states, lower negatives among the general population, momentum from recent contest wins, and polls better against the opposition, does anyone actually think it's even slightly probable that the supers are going to pick the other one? That's absurd.

*NOTE* I was a Richardson supporter who after some thought has gone to Obama for political reasons.

I notice that the Obama campaign delegate projection spreadsheet "leaked" recently projected that at this point Obama would have 1,160 pledged delegates.

Nice projecting.

I believe they should post the committed delegate and overall delegate counts separately. I mean how much extra work is that, and it is a lot more informative.

Take a moment and glance at the poll numbers for MI in the general election in the top right corner of this page and tell me who that state supports more, HRC or Obama?