Headlines don’t always tell the whole story

Headlines all across the country today declared that Bernie Sanders won the Michigan primary, but that depends on your definition of won.

Sanders picked up a point and half more primary voters than Hillary Clinton, but what counts is delegates. Michigan awards 130 delegates to the Democratic nominating convention during its primary, giving Sanders 65 delegates to Clinton’s 58. But the state also has 17 superdelegates, many of whom are already committed to Clinton.

This is how Politico scores the Michigan delegate outcome:

So, Hillary actually “won” Michigan.

Though the morning paper got around to running a small graphic showing the delegate counts so far, it did not yet have all of the late night results and thus was out of date by the time it hit the driveway.

Here is the current Wall Street Journal delegate count showing Trump leading Cruz by just 99 delegates:

 

Trump picked up 71 delegates Tuesday to Cruz’s 56, while Clinton added 87 delegates to Sanders’ 69.