People need to wise up to The Game As It Is Really Played. Delegates are also the ones who establish the party platform for the next four years. It’s not ALL about being the candidate, it’s also about internal factions affecting the platform and grabbing a share of the internal party power for the next four years, and steering the resulting goodies towards THEIR factions for those four years. We are not just watching the fight for the nomination–we are also watching the biggest factions ("Progressives" versus "DLC/Centrist") of the party duke it out for bargaining chips at the convention, and for the subsequent resulting power and perks. That internal division of power and perks applies even if the nominee loses the general election.

As point person for the DLC/Centrist faction, there is no real reason at all for Clinton to concede at this point even if she knows she won’t win the nomination. Unless the party leaders and the opposition faction agree to give HER faction some outsized influence at the convention, the power play for Clinton and for the DLC/Centrist faction is to continue fighting, to grab more sway and more delegates for the control-of-the-party intramural scrimmage coming up.

No matter how the final nomination result comes in, and no matter the result in November, Clinton and her faction(s) benefit in the long run from continuing to fight and gain delegates. Unless and until the other party faction(s) cede that to her faction(s), she can and will keep right on rolling, stacking up convention chips.

1) McCain beats Obama in the coming general elections (magnifying and carrying her electability point over to 2012).

2) Obama wins now, but subsequently has four very poor years in the White House; the country is disillusioned.

3) Obama wins now, but, God forbid, passes away at the end of his term (not even giving his VP a partial incumbancy advantage).

Does anyone really think Clinton can unseat a successful and living fourty-something Pres. Obama in 2008? Imo, it is either now or in 2016 (or never) for Clinton. And, Claudia, I think your Clintonian reason to concede now is a bit baseless thus. (Not that I don’t want her to concede; the sooner the better for me; I am eager to see how Obama holds up against the Republican machine.)

They have a really cool map feature which defaults to the basic swing state configuration (those states that are pretty much in the bag for either party are marked in red or blue) and then you can click on the remaining states to make them red or blue and see how that affects the odds- when you click on enough states so that only 12 are left, it calculates the mathematical probability of each party getting to 270, based on the current polling data in the remaining states. You do have to keep in mind that if you start clicking on the ones you think your party will take, but don’t ‘give’ any to the other side, then it skews it tremendously so that it looks like your guy is a shoo-in. So, click on ones you think that Obama will take and ones you think McCain will take (you can also look at the link for that state to see how it’s leaning at the moment, and view the historical data of how the state usually goes.)

The scariest part is I was clicking on some that I thought were reasonable assumptions and came up with an electoral tie. Can anyone even imagine how that would go down?? Yikes.

But when you start looking at the polling head to heads by state, it’s a different picture- there are some swing states where he’s more vulnerable than she is against McCain. That’s how it stands right now, and it certainly could change as the general campaign gets underway, so I’m not trying to make more of it than it really is. But just as it could change in the general election for Obama to pull ahead in those states that he’d need to carry, there are also some states that a Dem would expect to carry that he may not- so the general campaign could tilt it in the other direction to give McCain a substantial win, too. It’s going to come down to who runs a better campaign, IMO. But the irony is that the Dems shouldn’t have had to even break a sweat to win this one, and instead it’ll likely be at least a close election. And yeah, I think that says something about the relative ability of each party’s nomination process to produce the most electable candidate possible in any given cycle.

"Winning big in a state thats never going to swing for your party doesnt help you in the general election" - Maybe it does maybe it doesnt. Winning big or small in small states does matter though in the general election. Right? Your second point that you think I missed the point is about getting the support of voters from other party, I am not saying anything otherwise, just how are you making the predicament for Hillary to be able to pick right wing or independent people more than Obama strikes me though. Look, it is all speculation to me, Hillary is not a particularly loved person by many within Dems or outside of Dems, same argument may be made for Barack for people who dont like to stomack to see a black person in the chief commander seat.

Would you also say that since Obama is favored mostly by educated people and since many of the voters in the general election is not up-to the intellectual level of Obama supporters thats why he has less chance than Hillary, I’d have no difficulty believing in that.