What's Are Mike Bloomberg's Odds of Winning Democratic Nomination?

We post this one again from last night just in case you missed it. Raw Story reports:

That said, Bloomberg’s late entrance as the potential savior of the Democratic Party could also be his downfall. He didn’t miss out on many delegates by skipping the first four Democratic contests, which are all in relatively small states. But FiveThirtyEight election forecaster Nate Silver predicts it is “unlikely” that Bloomberg will have a big enough surge to fully overtake Biden before Super Tuesday.

“Bloomberg could certainly do reasonably well on Super Tuesday and get a surge in later states,” Silver wrote. “But at that point, 38 percent of delegates will already have been chosen.” Even if Bloomberg manages to win 30% of the delegates available on Super Tuesday, Silver continued, he would then “need to get 64 percent of the delegates in all the states beyond Super Tuesday to earn a majority of pledged delegates, which is an awfully high bar to clear.”

According to Silver’s model, Bloomberg is much more likely to win a “plurality” of pledged delegates before the Democratic convention this summer — and even there the model only gives him a 1 in 40 chance to do so. If no candidate goes to the Milwaukee convention in July with either a majority of delegates or a significant lead, Democrats could see a contested convention. If Bloomberg can surge to the lead by then, it’s entirely plausible he could make the case to Sanders-wary Democrats that he has the best chance to defeat Trump, and perhaps win the nomination on a second ballot or later. Under convention rules, after the first ballot pledged delegates are free to support whomever they want and the infamous superdelegates — excluded from the first ballot this time around — are allowed to vote.

Anything’s possible in politics in the age of Trump, but for many Democrats this is pretty close to a nightmare scenario, one that contemporary party politics is designed to avoid. There hasn’t been a genuinely contested convention since the 1972 Democratic convention, when Sen. George McGovern was forced to give his acceptance speech at 2:30 a.m. No convention in either party has required a second ballot since 1952.

An article well worth your time.