To repeat, these are not predictions. On the contrary, they describe a rose-colored-glasses scenario for Sanders that I consider to be very unlikely. To develop them, I started with our original pledged delegate targets for Sanders. Those already look optimistic for Sanders, who has underperformed his delegate targets in most primaries (he’s beaten them in most caucuses, but there aren’t many caucuses left on the calendar).
But for Sanders to get a pledged delegate majority, even our original targets aren’t enough now — they’d leave him 92 delegates short. So I kept tweaking these numbers upward until I got Sanders to 988 delegates. I was a bit more conservative about giving him extra delegates in states with substantial black or Hispanic populations, since Sanders has tended to underperform our original projections in those states. But mostly, I had to be very liberal about those extra delegates.
