The Aftermath of the North Carolina and Indiana Primaries

I received this e-mail today from the Barack Obama campaign. In the aftermath of Tuesday's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, the campaign is putting its spin on the results as well as the future of the race. However, even with the bias, there is some pretty good information regarding the delegate count.

Michael --

News broke this morning that Senator Clinton made three separate loans to her campaign in the past 30 days -- including one as recently as Monday.

These loans total more than $6.4 million, which combined with her previous personal loans, add up to at least $11.4 million she's loaned her campaign since February.

A spokesman said she may continue to "loan the campaign additional money out of her jointly-held assets" -- which include more than $100 million in income since her husband left the White House.

Meanwhile, by winning a double-digit victory in North Carolina and closing the gap in Indiana, Barack won another 100 delegates.

Barack Obama is now just 172 delegates away from winning the Democratic nomination. It's within sight.

This is a decisive moment in this race.

Barack has already won more votes, more delegates, and more than twice as many states as Senator Clinton, whose path to the nomination has grown extremely narrow. But these loans show that her campaign will continue to contest the remaining primaries vigorously.

We need to show that the voices of more than 1.5 million ordinary people donating whatever they can afford are more powerful than one person giving more than $11 million to their own campaign.

Here's the math of where we stand ...

There are only six contests remaining on the Democratic primary calendar and only 217 pledged delegates left to be awarded. Only 7% of the pledged delegates remain on the table. There are 253 remaining undeclared superdelegates, for a total of 470 delegates left to be awarded.

With North Carolina and Indiana complete, Barack Obama only needs 170 total delegates to capture the Democratic nomination. This is only 36% of the total remaining delegates.
Conversely, Senator Clinton needs 326 delegates to reach the Democratic nomination, which represents a startling 69% of the remaining delegates.

With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days.

While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.

We want to be clear -- we believe that the winner of a majority of pledged delegates will be and should be the nominee of our party.

And we estimate that after the Oregon and Kentucky primaries on May 20th, we will have won a majority of the overall pledged delegates.

Evidently, the Clinton campaign agrees. According to a recent news report, by even their most optimistic estimates the Clinton Campaign expects to trail by more than 100 pledged delegates and will then ask the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters.

But we have our own case to make: that millions of Americans volunteering their time and donating in small amounts have built a campaign that has won the most delegates, the most states, and the most votes.

And this campaign -- your campaign -- will be the one that wins the presidency in November and delivers a wave of support for Democrats at every level of office.

Click the link below to make a donation.

https://donate.barackobama.com/results

We'll be in touch as the situation evolves.

Thank you,

David Plouffe

Campaign Manager

Obama for America