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Why are people still voting for Hillary? Because Hillary tells them she's winning.
I'm tired of hearing pundits ask why, if Obama is the presumptive nominee, are so many people in WV and Kentucky still voting for Hillary.
The answer is that she's misleading them. She goes around saying that she's winning this race, and that she is winning the popular vote. What she doesn't tell them is that the popular vote doesn't count.
The delegates are the only measure that counts and she has lost that.
The danger about her going around ignoring this point is that her supporters in turn, will ignore this point and the voters in Kentucky and Puerto Rico will ignore this point.
And when Obama legitimately wins the nomination, they'll think he stole the nomination from her. That something unfair happened.
If she doesn't respect the rules, why should her supporters?
This is why I think she should step out of the race.
Comments (24)
When you say "the popular vote doesn't count", that sounds rather undemocratic. It's much better and more accurate to say "there is no popular vote".
Let's make it clear that the so-called "popular vote" figures bandied around by the Clintonites are nothing of the sort. They are just collections numbers carefully cherry-picked to make it look like Hillary is winning.
The reality is that no one knows what the real "popular vote" is, but it's highly unlikely to be anything resembling the figures that Hillary needs.
May 19, 2008 6:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
People are still voting for Hillary because she has
more intelligence, substance and breadth of knowledge
than Obama.
She works a lot harder than he, if you want to really compare
their senate records.
Example, her child safety bill recently passed the senate. MSM
didn't think it important enough to tell you about it, though.
She is a better politician, and plays a lot cleaner that B.O., who hijacked the web and launched a massive smear campaign that has gone for 6 months straight.
Lotsa reasons.
So stop making excuses for Barry the loser.
May 19, 2008 11:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Problem is the facts. Obama is ahead because he is the stronger candidate, he has won more elected delegates. You may wish the metrics were different and so better favored your candidate, but Hillary Clinton agreed to the rules at the beginning of the contest and it is disengenuous to create a new set of rules once you are losing.
The fact is, she lost this election when she made a political calculation (with the advice of Mark Penn and Bill Clinton) to position herself as a war hawk and vote for AUMF. This was the most important turning point for me, and I am Hillary's demographic. If she had stood with her 23 Senate colleagues (including 4 Democratic women) and voted against Bush's War, I would have voted for her. She didn't lose my vote because she is a woman (I am a woman and an avowed feminist), she lost my vote because she voted for a war I oppose and because she never appeared to learn from this mistake (like Mr Bush).
May 19, 2008 11:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
“...the way the loser loses will determine whether the winner wins in November...”
-- Rahm Emanuel
--------------------
The Clintons: No game...No shame...No class...!!!
May 20, 2008 12:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually you're wrong, Obama has not won the nomination and he won't end up with enough delegates by June 3 either. It's Obama who has been lying about the number of delegates needed. It is not 2025 as he and his supporters have been repeatedly lying about. Under the DNC rules, Florida and Michigan do not lose all of their delegates for voting early, they only lose 50%. That is the DNC rule but if you listen to Obama's repeated lies you can be excused for parrotting that lie also.
Hillary Clinton correctly states that when she gets her fair share of the 50% of the Michigan and Florida delegates as the DNC rules require, then she is in the lead. But of course Obama's team have been repeating the lie over and over luring super-delegates over before they realize that on May 30 when the DNC meets and awards the 50% of Florida and Michigan delegates that Hillary is the one who is ahead.
Go ahead and live your lie. That's how Rove ran his campaigns for Bush why shouldn't we be stuck with another lying empty suit as president in 2009.
May 19, 2008 7:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
The 50% thing is a Republican rule that applied to Michigan and Florida from the Republican side.
We're not "parrotting" Obama talking points. Well, I'm not. I just watch the news and stay-up-to-date online.
May 19, 2008 7:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh yeah, the number is 2026. That's the DNC number and the number Clinton agreed to. She only started citing 2210 when she realized how close Obama was to 2026.
And the reason they both need superdelegates to get to 2026 is because 2026 is the majority of super and pledged delegates. Obama will have clinched the majority of pledged delegates, barring something astronomical, by Tuesday.
Which makes Gary Cohen's point all the more relevant. You seem to think Obama's cheating and that if he wins, the nomination would have been wrongly taken from Clinton. That's just not the case. Obama's been playing fair and square.
May 19, 2008 7:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
I completely agree with the post, and pmSanFran (sorry to put you blast like this, but you) only proves the point.
People aren't making a "protest vote" even though they know she can't win. They think she can win.
May 19, 2008 7:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
yeah those WV and Kentucky voters are just too stupid to think for themselves and are being lead around by the nose by that nasty old Hillary.
May 19, 2008 7:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
PMSANFRAN, I don't want to instigate an argument, and perhaps the tone of my post was aggressive.
But the content is correct.
Let me address some points you made: first, I never said that Obama won the nomination. I said "when he wins the nomination"... I say that because the entire primary is predicated on who wins the magic number of delegates. The Clinton campaign already conceded that they wouldn't be able to win on this measure. THE measure.
Also:
In December 2007, the DNC ruled that because FL and MI were holding their primaries before Iowa, N.H., Nevada and South Carolina, (the four-state agreement that every candidate signed that said they would not campaign OR PARTICIPATE in any state that held primaries earlier than those states), they would be stripped of ALL their delegates and the results of their primaries would not count at all.
This superseded the 50% delegate penalty in the DNC bylaws.
You may not like it, I'm sorry, but this is a fact.
It is also a fact that Hillary is giving her supporters false hope based on a false premise.
I don't underestimate the intelligence of voters in WV or Kentucky or anywhere else.
My whole point is that Hillary is asking for votes and money without being completely honest.
Does anyone else see the danger in leading all her supporters to believe that it doesn't matter if Obama wins the delegate count?
May 19, 2008 8:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I respectively disagree with you Gary. People are voting for Hillary not because she is misleading her supporters. People are still voting for her because she has not dropped out of the race and they feel that she is the better candidate.
Both camps will do their spin and Obama seems to have won the narrative in the punditocracy, that the pledged delegate count is the proper metric to determine the winner. Clearly, many SDs and voters agree.
Clinton may not win the argument, but I don't think that there is a hidden deception with Clinton's argument.
We already know that the delegates from FL and MI will be seated. Whatever the eventual resolution , the number of delegates necessary to mathematically win the nomination based on the delegates will not be 2025.
Further, the popular vote is the popular vote. No matter how the delegate math is resolved, the popular vote stands as is. FL and MI were certified elections. Without the popular vote estimates from the caucus states that attempt to measure the popular votes, so far, Hillary's math is correct when it comes to the popular vote.
She may not win, but there is no reason why she cannot use the argument in a genuine way.
May 19, 2008 8:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oops. That should read "Respectfully"
May 19, 2008 8:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I would RESPECTFULLY point oout two fundamental problems here. First is the often-overlooked mantra: just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. And just because Hillary CAN stay in the race doesn't make it ethical. What about the last 80 years of informal electoral precedent--the rules of the road, perhaps--does Clinton not understand? When you're mathematically out of reach, you drop out. Having relatives run for public office, losing gracefully was the first lesson I learned about politics from a young age. Only one bloc of candidates generally defies that mold: the Gravels, the Kuciniches, the Pauls,etc., who remain in the race at all costs until their money runs out... (hint: Clinton in millions of dollars in debt).
Second, I'm not sure what you mean by "certified elections." In tandem with my aforementioned mantra: every candidate was told about the uselessness of campaigning in Michigan/Florida. The next obvious step was to withdraw from the ballots. Everybody did it--including Edwards--and equally assumed Clinton would pull out as well. Obviously, Clinton pulled a fast one on them. In other words, if Edwards were in Obama's position, we'd be having the SAME arguments.
So when Clinton says things like, "We're going to see where we are June 3rd" or leads the charge to seat Michigan, she's not being so much 'deceptive' as just administering false hope to her supporters, setting up for a harder hurt when she finally loses and simply making the healing process harder for Obama.
May 19, 2008 8:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
About your first pargraph:
You forgot the following names of candidates who "disgracefully" took it to the convention. Some with a much bigger "losing" margins.
Ronald Reagan
Edward Kennedy
Jesse Jackson
I'm sure you think that these guys are all disgraces.
MI and FL were certified elections. It just means that the voting results are legally accurate.
Edwards and Obama were not bound by the DNC to remove their names from the ballot in MI and FL. They made a calculated political move to appease the state Democratic committees in NH and IA. No one complained about FL. So they left their names on ballot.
Your last paragraph is just self serving, doesn't deserve a reply!
May 19, 2008 9:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe not disgraces.
But they all lost the nomination, and what's more their parties lost the general election following the convention.
(I am assuming you are talking about Reagan's 1976 bid, since 1980 was wrapped up well before the convention.)
May 19, 2008 11:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
The "popular vote" metric is an invention of the Clinton campaign to justify her viability to the SuperDelegates. It has no other value.
The "popular vote" Clinton cites excludes the "popular votes" of four states: Iowa, Maine, Nebraska, and Washington. The "popular vote" Clinton cites depends on the assertion that vote totals from caucus states are properly representative of the whole state (Does anyone really believe Barack Obama would have received only 28K votes in his home state of Hawaii?). The "popular vote" Clinton cites includes the Michigan election, where only the name of one of the current frontrunners was on the ballot. I would argue that no one would accept as fair and legitimate a democratic election where only one candidate's name was on the ballot, for whatever reason, except in North Korea. To argue that the Michigan vote is a legitimate reflection of the will of the Michigan people means that no one, not one single voter, not a single being in the entire state of Michigan wants Barack Obama as their nominee. Talk about disenfranchisement!!! To quote Senator Clinton to General Petraeus: "That strains credulity."
But all that being said, it is irrelevant to the outcome of the Democratic Presidential Primary, except to Senator Clinton's case to the SuperDelegates. And listen, if she can sway enough of them and clinch the nomination despite losing the elected delegates, them's the rules, and I'll vote for her as our Party's nominee.
May 20, 2008 12:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nevada, not Nebraska. I have been to both states and they are quite different but both beautiful in their own serene and stark ways.
May 20, 2008 12:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Edwards and Obama were not bound by the DNC to remove their names from the ballot in MI and FL. They made a calculated political move to appease the state Democratic committees in NH and IA. No one complained about FL. So they left their names on ballot.
Actually, the agreement ALL candidates signed with the DNC says they will not "participate" most of the candidates logically interpreted this as not being on the ballot. Some candidates with a loose interpretation of logic and the meaning of words, decided that you could choose to leave your name on the ballot in MI and FL but that choice would not in their minds be "participating."
Officials in FL had a different approach, they did not let candidates make a choice one way or the other, they determined their ballot much as participants in the early debates were chosen. Obama and Edwards did not have an option to have their names removed from the ballot there, and so their pledge not to participate was not broken by being on the ballot there.
May 20, 2008 8:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Just a couple of aside questions here:
Is it just possible that many voters foolishly persist in the old-fashioned American habit of voting for the BEST candidate, as they see it? Is it just possible that they see THAT as their strongest duty (as opposed to worrying about who is supposed to win or lose)?
I realize that is a strange concept to many of the sophisticates here at TPM, but that really is the way that many out-of-touch American citizens think.
May 19, 2008 8:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
of course her supporters think she is the best candidate. of course they're voting for her because she's still in the race.
My point is that if Hillary doesn't acknowledge how one wins the democratic primary, by delegate measure, if she feels that the legitimate measure is not legitimate, if Barack Obama wins by this measure and she doesn't honor that, then what will she honor?
May I ask what would constitute a victory for someone other than herself?
Currently, the DNC rules state that 2025 delegates are enough to declare the winner. IF they change that, and Obama reaches that new number, will she acknowledge that he won fair and square?
Now you can continue to contest every outcome until you get one that you like, but how many times can you change it?
May 19, 2008 9:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gone over this many times, but - there is no rule that says you are the winner because you are ahead in pledged delegates. You have to get over the line to win. With neither candidate getting over the line, it is ok to look at other metrics especially if the voting is close.
Both candidates need SDs, if Obama goes over the needed line, whatever the number becomes, she will concede as long as MI and FL is resolved. She has made that pretty clear.
May 19, 2008 9:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
My question, airwon, is what is "the needed line" if it is not 2025?
If the DNC agrees to include some kind of compromise with MI and FL on May 31st, and it's not the outcome Hillary hoped for, will she honor the decision?
As I understand it, she'll accept nothing less than all delegates being seated, and in MI, all votes go to her including uncommitted.
Do you see what's going on here?
May 19, 2008 10:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
To pmSanFran and company:
This is Hillary's position today (via New York Times):
She also dismissed Democratic nominating rules requiring proportional allocation of delegates from primaries and caucuses, rather than the winner-take-all system used by the Republicans.
“If we had same rules as the Republicans, I would be the nominee right now,” she said.
Remember when you were a kid, and the schoolyard bully would arbitrarily announce a new rule near the end of a game he or she was losing -- one that would give him or her victory?
That's what Hillary has reduced herself to.
It's pathetic, if not pathological.
For sure, it is sad.
May 19, 2008 9:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
“...the way the loser loses will determine whether the winner wins in November...”
-- Rahm Emanuel
Actually, Rahm, it's the other way around. And Obama is stuck with losers like Gary that cost him votes every time they post. It's weird.
May 20, 2008 5:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
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