Getting to 2025

With the Oregon and Kentucky primaries coming up tomorrow, Senator Obama is either going to clinch or come *this close* to reaching the 2025 mark this week.  The 2209 number won't be entirely valid until the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee meets on May 31st, because we won't know what the overall attainable number will be until that day (and we can't be sure that the majority number will be 2209 because we can't be sure that Florida and Michigan will be 100% seated).

However, tomorrow, May 20th, marks an important milestone in the campaign.  May 20th informally marks the end of the primary season campaign.  We can go through a number of scenarios to see in which ways Senator Clinton can win the nomination, but the bottom line is that Senator Obama is already assumed to be the presumptive nominee and that notion will only be reinforced tomorrow.  Everything else will be technicalities which will largely sum up to academic arguments.  In other words they won't be enough to alter the outcome of the race.

According to Dem Con Watch, Senator Obama only needs 114 delegates to reach the 2025 number, and the New York Times Superdelegate calculator this morning notes that Senator Clinton needs 93% of the remaining Superdelegates to claim the nomination.

The Obama campaign is not planning on declaring victory on Tuesday night.  Instead, the campaign will likely wait until all of the primaries have concluded as well as await a Rules Committee decision before claiming victory.  Once the campaign reaches 2029 (or whatever the ultimate number will be), the campaign will declare victory.

This is not to say that the media or the blogosphere will not coronate him the victory - as both will.