Can Bloomberg Win 30% of Pledged Delegates on Super Tuesday?

Interestingly, The New York Times (see "Centrist Democrats Want to Stop Sanders. They’re Not Sure Who Can. Unless a moderate favorite soon emerges, party leaders may increasingly look to Michael R. Bloomberg as a potential savior.") is lining up with Matt Taibbi. As long as Democratic centrists fail to coalesce around s single standard-bearer Bernie will continue to collect the most delegates in the march to the convention in Milwaukee.

The question is whether 30% of the electorate in the various Democratic primaries is enough to win of majority of the 4,750 delegates. Lambert Strether, joining Nate Silver, sees a brokered convention as a distinct possibility:

Those who want Sanders to win on the first ballot must expect Sanders to start winning outright majorities. He’s not doing that. I doubt very much he will do that in Nevada (hat tip, Harry Reid), or South Carolina. If Sanders wins California, that will be an amazing achievement, but the California Democrat Establishment is as nasty as they come. I don’t believe that the Democrat Party establishment will ever roll over, and allow Sanders to be nominated even if he leads in the delegate count. Too many little Madisons need too many ballet lessons for the Democratic strategists, consultants, lobbyists, media assets, and party elites to simple concede power, even to the future of their party. So, I assume that the Sanders campaign is gaming this out. A point to consider is that the Milwaukee convention is currently an omnishambles (and perhaps, like IA seems to have, been, a chaos ladder?) If we end up with the Milwaukee equivalent of Grant Park in Chicago 1968, that would probably hand the election to Trump (something most Democrat elites, deep down, would be quite happy with), but more important, could destroy the “army” that the Sanders campaign so carefully put together, rendering it incapable of independent operation following the convention after a collapse in discipline and subsequent backbiting and recrimination. For some, that might not be a bad thing.

There's also a possibility that Sanders begins to pull away in the run up to Super Tuesday. Bernie wins both Nevada and South Carolina; then Bloomberg's half-a-billion-dollars in ads turn out to be a bust on March 3. That's a best-case scenario for Sanders, and it can happen.

Bloomberg is furiously buying the endorsements of congressmen like Queens' Gregory Meeks. In the wake of the resurfacing of Bloomberg's racist defense of stop and frisk (which Charles Blow explores today in "The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg"), it is hard to see how purchasing an establishment that the voters despise is a sure-fire path to victory.

On Tuesday night NBC's Chuck Todd waxed on with stars in his eyes about who Jim Clyburn will endorse and better yet who the Kennedys will favor. This is the kind of clueless, cockeyed shit being peddled in the corporate media.

It was apparent to me in the Obama years that the elites in government, finance and the corporate media don't really have a connection to the earth; they float above it on a bubble of money. This makes it hard for them to figure out what's going on in the minds of all of us mud people grubbing away for our daily bread.

You would think Bloomberg could figure this out. We'll see. But right now I'm guessing he won't reach 30% on Super Tuesday.