Speak of the Devil, i.e., "Math"

David Plouffe personally writes me to explain!

It's after the jump!

UPDATE: What? YOU MEAN HE WASN'T WRITING ME PERSONALLY? Shoot. And here I had thought Barack and Michelle were also my pen pals. You think they didn't appreciate the crock pot I sent them for Christmas?

And, fwiw, I'm not as scared of numbers as the next fella. Dad sort of forced me to figure it out. But... the math that the Obama team is doing is based on numbers only they know. And there are multiple unknowns, at the moment.

Ana --

Our projections show the most likely outcome of yesterday's elections will be that Hillary Clinton gained 187 delegates, and we gained 183.

That's a net gain of 4 delegates out of more than 370 delegates available from all the states that voted.

For comparison, that's less than half our net gain of 9 delegates from the District of Columbia alone. It's also less than our net gain of 8 from Nebraska, or 12 from Washington State. And it's considerably less than our net gain of 33 delegates from Georgia.

The task for the Clinton campaign yesterday was clear. In order to have a plausible path to the nomination, they needed to score huge delegate victories and cut into our lead.

They failed.

It's clear, though, that Senator Clinton wants to continue an increasingly desperate, increasingly negative -- and increasingly expensive -- campaign to tear us down.

That's her decision. But it's not stopping John McCain, who clinched the Republican nomination last night, from going on the offensive. He's already made news attacking Barack, and that will only become more frequent in the coming days.

And then he asked for money.

They must have some fancy calculators. I tried to work the math backwards from their estimate and couldn't follow it. At least not using the math from my last post... Then I realized that, for the moment, all these numbers are sort of guesses and will not submit to the fierce hope of a spreadsheet.