Tonight should make for some amazing television viewing, as the networks have never had to deal with so much data from so many states at one time.

My guess is that the Hillary-Obama race will get a slim majority of the coverage, even though it shouldn’t. Because there’s not enormous range for what happens tonight. Hillary wins some states, Obama wins some states, but neither one looks set to have an enormous delegate edge.

By comparison, on the Republican side, we won’t have a nominee locked up tonight, but the range of possibilities goes from McCain up over Romney by a little (in which we’ve got a footrace) and McCain up by Romney by a lot (in which the race is effectively over).

Number-crunching lefty bloggers are starting to notice that barring some sort of colossal collapse on the part of one of their two candidates, they’re going all the way to the convention:

From this point, quick math shows that after Super Tuesday, only 1,428 pledged delegates will still be available. Now, here is where the problem shows up. According to current polling averages, the largest possible victory for either candidate on Super Tuesday will be Clinton 889 pledged delegates, to 799 pledged delegates for Obama. (In all likelihood, the winning margin will be lower than this, but using these numbers helps emphasize the seriousness of the situation.) As such, the largest possible pledged delegate margin Clinton can have after Super Tuesday is 937 to 862. (While it is possible Obama will lead in pledged delegates after Super Tuesday, it does not currently seem possible for Obama to have a larger lead than 75). That leaves Clinton 1,088 pledged delegates from clinching the nomination, with only 1,428 pledged delegates remaining. Thus, in order to win the nomination without the aid of super delegates, in her best-case scenario after Super Tuesday, Clinton would need to win 76.2% of all remaining pledged delegates. Given our proportional delegate system, there is simply no way that is going to happen unless Obama drops out.

That blogger, Chris Bowers, also doesn’t see any easy option to avoid a massive fight over the Michigan and Florida delegations.