I’ll combine my post predicting the outcome of today’s Democratic Primary in West Virginia, and my post giving and discussing the results, here.

My prediction is on this table, on the left side of the line, and the actual results on the right side, for the last several primaries.

Every state is special, and some are more special than others. West Virginia has 29 pledged delegates, but not all of them were assigned today. I assume they will be assigned later. Thus, the slight difference in numbers between what I predicted and what happened.

A key message here is this. Clinton and Sanders did exactly as well in the West Virginia primary as my model predicted, and that has been very close to exactly true for most primary races all along.

There is something important about this likely win that I want to point out.

According to many (but not all) of those pushing the candidates on climate change, Sanders is THE man when it comes to climate, and Clinton will be throwing the planet under the bus the moment she is elected. The degree of contrast between Sanders and Clinton in the minds of many leading climate activists is an overstatement, and highly inaccurate. Both candidates have stated that we need to come to the point where we keep the fossil Carbon in the ground, but Sanders is the only candidate who has come out with a weakened version of this, where we only try to attain 80% non-fossil fuel use by the middle of the century. Sanders wants to make fracking illegal, which he is unlikely to be able to do, while Clinton wants to regulate it into near nothingness, which could be achieved in a year or so. On the other hand, Clinton did say to a coal miner the other day that we have to find a way to keep mining coal as long as it does not add CO2 to the atmosphere. Sure, let’s do that! But first, we’ll have to change physics, because we GET energy from releasing fossil Carbon, but we have to USE energy to re-attach the Carbon to something solid.

In other words, neither candidate is where they need to be on climate change, and we will have to work to make that situation change. But, if you ask most people, they will probably tell you that Sanders is the climate change guy, and Clinton not so much. But we also know that addressing Climate Change means, essentially, shutting down the main industry in West Virginia, which is coal mining.

So why is Sanders beating Clinton in West Virginia?

I’ll put the results of the primary below later this evening or tomorrow morning. I’ll be busy during the time the returns are coming in, visiting with my friend Emo Phillips, but I’ll update the post at a later time.