Stirling McLaughlin's Blogtag:www.talkingpointsmemo.com,2008:/talk/blogs/stirling_mclaughlin//19632008-05-26T12:52:23ZMovable Type Pro 4.21-enWhy is the popular vote so unpopular?tag:tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com,2008:/talk//17.1969732008-05-26T12:52:23Z2008-05-26T12:52:23ZNote: This article originally appeared on pinkomag.com.Hillary Clinton wants you to know that she has won the popular vote. She has even gone as fas as to evoke Al Gore by saying that we Democrats should not allow an election...Stirling McLaughlin
Note: This article originally appeared on pinkomag.com.
Hillary Clinton wants you to know that she has won the popular vote. She has even gone as fas as to evoke Al Gore by saying that we Democrats should not allow an election to be snatched away from the candidate who has won the popular vote. This would be a provocative argument if it where not for one inconvenient truth. Her math just doesn't make sense.
Hillary is asking that we accept a few stipulations in order for us to come up with her popular vote numbers:
1: Accept the Florida votes as cast in a primary that she herself said wasn't going to count, and that Harold Ickes (one of her lead advisers) helped craft the rules for.</li>
2: Accept that Michigan be counted as well and that none of the hundreds of thousands of voters who voted against her by pulling the lever for "uncommitted" get counted for Obama, whose name didn't appear on the ballot but who was certainly the candidate of choice for many of those people.
3: Finally take an even bigger leap and accept that voters in primary states should count more then voters in caucus states. This is not some sort of primary vs. caucus argument. We aren't talking about which method is more procedurally valid. We are talking pure mathmatics. Let me explain...
The oft quoted popular vote totals give inordinate weight to primary states because the "votes" counted for caucus states like Iowa are the initial delegate numbers (local representatives), not actual voters. For example, the Iowa count has 1,677 "votes" even though something like 236,000 people voted. You encounter similar problems when looking at states like Nevada, Washington, Maine etc...
Gary Langer, the director of polling at ABC News, has an interesting rundown of the numbers if you include an estimate of the actual votes from the caucus states. His figures? As of May 16th, 17,607,152 for Obama and 17,504,742 for Clinton, or an Obama lead of about 102,410 votes.
Now, this does not include all those votes from Hillary's landslide victory in Kentucky (or Obama's landslide victory in Oregon) so when we factor those in, with 97% of Oregon reporting it's more like 18,176,329 for Obama and 18,214,506 for Clinton, or a Clinton lead of about 38,177 votes. That's with Michigan and Florida included. So Hillary is winning the popular vote, but only if you are being very charitable.
Look for that lead to all but disappear if Obama picks up any more states in early June. Also, if you give Obama even one fifth of the 238,168 uncommitted votes from Michigan...