Was Super Tuesday The Beginning Of The End For Bernie Sanders?

Hillary Clinton took a strong lead over Bernie Sanders in the primary race to become Democratic presidential nominee on Super Tuesday.

As of late Tuesday night, Clinton won seven states to Sanders' four states. But it's important to look even closer into those numbers.

The four states that Sanders won were Vermont, Oklahoma, Colorado and Minnesota.

Sanders was expected to win Vermont as it is his home state; that was an easy win for him. Other states will require more work on his campaign's part to both educate voters about him and to convince them to vote for him.

Moreover, the states that Sanders won are, technically speaking, small. The whole numbers of states won does not particularly matter in the race to be presidential nominee.

What does matter is the number of delegates. When you vote in the primary, you vote for the delegate assigned to your district to vote for your chosen candidate at the Democratic National Convention over the summer. So the bigger the state, the higher the number of delegates.

A candidate doesn't win every delegate from a state -- only the regions that voted for them. But when a candidate gets, say, 50 percent of a vote in a huge state, that counts more than getting a higher majority in a tiny state.

So Sanders won four states to Clinton's seven, which doesn't sound like such a huge loss. But when you look at delegates, those numbers looks a lot different.

There are only 16 delegates at stake from Vermont and 38 from Oklahoma. Colorado is a little heftier with 66 delegates, as is Minnesota with 77 delegates.

But compare this to some of the states Clinton won on Super Tuesday: There are 222 delegates in Texas, 102 in Georgia and 95 in Virginia.

This means that Clinton comes out of Super Tuesday with a big lead in number of delegates -- and thus a huge lead in the race to be the Democratic nominee.

Not to mention, Clinton has a vast majority of superdelegates voting for her thus far, giving her an even bigger boost.

If Sanders wants to have a chance at the nomination, he needs to push really hard in the upcoming states, especially the bigger ones. The primary votes will be going on for several more months, so there's still time for him to campaign, but it's a serious fight for him now.