For understandable reasons, attention to the May 6 delegate race has waned a bit this morning--but results are still trickling in. So I'm reposting my delegate tracker thread from last night, to see if there's interest.

So if you'd like to how the May 6 pledged-delegate races are looking at the moment, this is the place to be. My plan is to going to keep going until it becomes clear that USA Today has lost interest in updating its district vote totals. Of course, that point could come soon.

Hey, gang, this thread has moved to the new diary that I posted on Wednesday morning, May 7. C'mon over!

I've just posted a new delegate-tracker diary along the same lines as the ones I maintained during the Texas district and county caucuses and the Pennsylvania primary.

In an attempt to get the new delegate tracker to read (and load) more quickly, though, this time I'm going to pack all of the background information--the stuff you probably don't need to see over and over again--into a diary of its own, linked from the "mothership." That "background materials" diary is what you're looking at now.

In this post, you can find information about the delegate and (ahem) "popular vote" races, prognosticators' picks, delegate threshold tables, and a fair amount more. I'm hoping that this stuff will put the delegate-tracker thread in somewhat better context--and make it easier to read. Enjoy!

I've been flattered by the nice response I've received for my delegate tracker threads following the Texas district and county caucuses and the Pennsylvania primary. Posting and maintaining them is tiring, but it's fun--and let's face it, I would be staying up (along with thousands of my fellow Kossacks) long into the night on these primary nights whether I had a Kos thread to update or not.

As you may have heard, North Carolina and Indiana will be holding primaries this coming Tuesday, May 6. I'm willing to give this another shot for those primaries--so the question now is: what would you like to see in a Delegate Tracker Thread next Tuesday night?

After an enjoyable (though exhausting) experience tracking the Texas county- and district-level convention results in a long diary last month, I thought it would be fun, and hopefully valuable to interested spectators, to post a diary tracking the results of the April 22 Pennsylvania primary as they come in--with special attention to the delegate count.

So if you're interested in knowing how the Pennsylvania pledged-delegate race is looking at the moment, this is the place to be. Now that we're into Wednesday, updates will be a little more sporadic, but I'm going to keep going until it becomes clear that USA Today has lost interest in updating its district vote totals.

Regarding comments: Previously I directed comments about the results to the front-page open threads. Those seem to have stopped, though, so now you can go ahead and say whatever you'd like here. Remarks directed at my silly tables particularly (or just designed to stroke my ego--heartily welcomed!) have of course always been welcome.

Anyone still reading this?

If you are, go ahead and comment here, I guess.

Updates will be sparse today (Monday, March 31), but I'll add in the newest numbers I see are up on Burnt Orange Report.

[Note: This diary was written in the immediate aftermath of Obama's Philadelphia speech on race, "A More Perfect Union."]

In the fall of 2000, as a second-year student at the University of Chicago Law School, I was one of about twenty students in a seminar called "Racism and the Law," taught by Professor (and then-state senator) Barack Obama.

It was my favorite class, and Obama my favorite professor, in my three years in Chicago. Obviously it's been exciting tracking the ol' prof since then (I can proudly say that I attended the now-famous "I'm against dumb wars" speech in person in 2002, and I was not one of the many Democrats "caught by surprise" by the power of the 2004 convention keynote address). The Speech today, though, has sent me back to my notes from my class in 2000.

Of course I was aware--more from the 2002 experience than the seminar, really--that Obama has an enormous talent for inspiring people; that's hardly news. But what was so exciting to me this morning was that the Obama of today's speech was the one who taught that seminar at the end of 2000.

This is Volume II of my thread for anyone who is trying to keep up with the Texas Democratic Party's halting attempts to publicize the results of the 8,224 precinct caucuses that were held on the evening of March 4. (Volume I is here.) Like (I suspect) many Kossacks, I'm maintaining my own spreadsheet tracking the results; this would be pretty exciting, if the trickle of information weren't so @#$@&# slow.

The quick upshot of the count at the moment is that it appears more or less inevitable that Obama will receive more than enough net delegates from the Texas caucus to overcome the slim delegate lead Clinton gained in the state's primary. Barring a stunning turnaround during the caucus-result-counting process, Obama has won Texas.

I'm sure I'm not the only one hanging on the Texas Democratic Party's caucus results website, waiting for the autorefresh that brings new numbers.

A new set of information seems to be rolling in every half-hour or so; I am (as, I imagine, are several other Kossacks) trying to keep tabs on it.

This is a sequel to my my Half-Assed Rhode Island Delegate Projections diary--which still appears to be the gold standard for Rhode Island delegate projections on DKos. (Admittedly that's not saying much.)

The idea of the series (of which this is the second and probably last installation) is to be a contrast to the work performed by Kossacks like MattTX, redvolution, and especially poblano. Those guys have spent hours poring though demographic data and conducting in-depth statistical analyses in order to produce thoughtful and well grounded projections of the delegate results in states like Texas and Ohio. In contrast, I find a poll, put together a simple spreadsheet, do absolutely no research whatsoever, and explain what I come up with.

So my process is proudly half-assed--but because the delegate calculations in the states I've dealt with are simple, I think my results are reasonably solid. (I'm not going to try this on Texas.)

I'm a great admirer of the delegate projections that MattTX, redvolution, and especially poblano have posted in recent weeks. I don't nearly have the statistics (or HTML) chops that those guys do, but this evening it occurs to me that I might have what it takes to tackle a much simpler problem: the likely delegate splits in the Rhode Island Democratic primary on March 4.

It is becoming increasingly clear: those of us who want to see a Democrat in the White House must put aside our disagreements, end the divisive rhetoric, and come together to answer the pressing question of this political season:

Is it spelled Obamican or Obamacan?

I'm sure I'm not the only Kossack who is keeping his/her own spreadsheet of popular vote and/or pledged delegate yields from each of the Democratic primary contests. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been confused at the conflicting numbers of pledged delegates that various media outlets (and official party sources, blogs, etc.) report Obama and Clinton have received in various state contests. And that's not even getting into the superdelegate mess, which I'm not even bothering to track.

One number that many sources seem to agree on at the moment, though, is that John Edwards is still sitting on twenty-six delegates that he won in the Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina contests. Unless I'm missing something, I think that's wrong; to my understanding, Edwards only has sixteen (at most) remaining, because the other ten have been distributed to Obama (six) and Clinton (four). If so, that would slightly change the state of the delegate race between those two--and Edwards' direct influence on same.

The March 2001 study into the bridge that collapsed Wednesday evening advised against refurbishing the bridge because of "high costs."