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Hillary Clinton Did NOT Win the Popular Vote - Quit Lying Hillary, It's OVER - you lost
I would like to point out that Hillary Clinton did NOT win the popular vote during the Democratic race for a presidential nominee – according to RealPolitics.com.
Barack Obama without IA, NV, ME, WA caucuses and without Michigan, ended up with 33,916 more votes than Hillary Clinton.
Barack Obama with IA, NV, ME, WA caucuses and without Michigan, ended up with 144,138 more votes than Hillary Clinton.
Even if you include Michigan and the caucuses of IA, NV, ME and WA (giving Obama the Uncommitted in Michigan – remember, his name wasn’t on the ballot for voters to choose from, Hillary’s was – the State vote wasn’t suppose to be counted), Barack Obama still leads by 53,997 votes.
The only way Hillary can CLAIM the popular vote is if she is allowed to count the Michigan primary and nothing from that race is given to Obama.
Voters in Michigan were told their vote would not count, so thousands more might have voted if they knew it would have counted. Barack Obama’s name was not on the ballot. He like the other Democratic candidates, except Hillary, removed their names from the ballot.
Think about Michigan’s primary vote as a sport event. You have two basketball players competing to see who can get the most free throws. During the 'official timing’, player one gets 22 baskets and player two gets 18. During a practice session however, player two gets 12 more and player one gets none.
Player one is announced the winner – player two says, “Whoa wait a minute, I got a total of 30 baskets. I’m the winner!”
Hillary Clinton is of course, player two. She's demanding something that didn't officially count and refuses to give Obama the same sense of entitlement.
I'll give Hillary this -- she did make history during the primary to be the first woman to have come 'so close' to winning and getting almost 18 million votes.
But the fact remains, Barack Obama won 242 more delegates and he won the popular vote.
Comments (4)
No matter how you count it, the popular vote is a wash. They really split it about evenly.
June 4, 2008 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly. That's why Obama's supporters should always point out that the race was about delegates, and Obama clearly won.
June 4, 2008 10:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
(I) Hillary Clinton, your future president, thank you for this endorsement from the WWFE.
349 trillion voters in Michigan and Florida have raised their voices and the message is clear: Americans want me to skip the Democratic nomination, and become president today.
Much Love,
Hillary "The People's Cackle" 08.
June 4, 2008 10:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
One thing the Clinton camp did very well was get the media to buy into some sort, any sort of "popular vote". With open primaries, closed primaries, primaries open to independents and Democrats only, and probably at least a dozen different ways of holding caucuses there is no way to "fairly" aggregate totals across states, unlike in the general election, where states are all holding relatively similar elections.
Delegate allocations adjust for population, and they add bonuses for tending to support Democrats and holding a contest later in the calendar. That's why it truly is, and should be, just a race for delegates.
The Obama campaign made a mistake, back when they were clearly ahead in any computation of popular vote, by not more forcefully pointing out that in the nomination contest there is no "popular vote". They did a little better in arguing that it's irrelevant, but by saying it's irrelevant you tacitly admit that it exists and can be counted. Which allows media outlets to count it as another horse-race indicator.
The Clinton spin here was quite good: in addition to getting popular acceptance of a metric that devalued the caucus states they did poorly in, they further used the "unfairness" of a "voter per delegate" measure to argue that caucuses are less fair, and therefore should be ignored entirely. Here at least most media sources called them on it a little, pointing out different ways to count popular vote (include Michigan, Florida, but don't adjust for Iowa, Maine, et al.). But it still gave credence to the meme that popular vote actually meant something.
You can try to count bodies that showed up at nomination contests, but that's a meaningless number, because you're counting apples, oranges, blueberries and watermelons.
June 4, 2008 2:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
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