Penn Counting on 'Primary Delegates'

Trailing in pledged delegates and with the popular vote in doubt, the Clinton campaign has apparently come up with another metric to convince superdelegates that there is a justification for going against the tide: Primary delegates.

At the end of today's Clinton conference call (during which Phil Singer said that if the Clinton campaign were a baseball team, they have a "great leftfielder in Mark Penn") NBC's Chuck Todd observed that Penn seemed to be using the term "primary delegates" more often, and he asked if that was a talking point the campaign might not be looking to use when making their pitch to superdelegates.

"If we are ahead in primary delegates—we're within 16, with a lot of primaries left to go— that's a factor," said Penn.