538: It’s Really Hard To Get Bernie Sanders 988 More Delegates

[paulthompson]

41. What?

When did I ever rely on Silver's analysis? I said he and his website has been terrible this primary season.

That said, numbers don't lie. As Silver points out, Sanders has to win a lot of states by big margins, and that's true. But if I were tweaking the numbers to figure out the best possible scenario for Sanders, I would lower the margins Sanders needs in many states (compared to Silver's analysis) and up the margin of victory he needs in California. In short, put most of Sanders' chips on California. He should win California by a margin of at least 30 points, instead of 15 as Silver would have it.

And that seems to be exactly what Sanders is planning to do. I saw in some article that Sanders made a comment along the lines that he's going to visit California more time than people can count between now and June.

The fact that Silver can't see that one big win in California is a better strategy than consistently winning by big margins in nearly all the other states to come is yet another reason why I don't put much stock in Silver's "expert" analyss.