In a Vote By Numbers World, Who Rules?
Posted on Sun Feb 17, 2008 at 06:00:39 PM EST
Tags: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama (all tags)
Paul Lukasiak, guest-blogging at Taylor Marsh's blog, crunches the numbers of votes cast so far in the Democratic presidential race. Why? Barack Obama is arguing that super-delegates should comply with the "will of the people."
Mr. Lukasiak's premise:
Based on exit polls, among the approximately 16.3 million people who identified themselves as Democrats, over 678,000 more voted for Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. If we’re going to “let the people decide" who the Democratic nominee would be, shouldn’t we be basing that on the will of Democrats themselves?
Here's the table of votes. His analysis is below, but go read his whole post, I've just reprinted highlights:
As of February 16, 2008, 391,992 more Democrats voted for Clinton than Obama. (my emphasis.)
That number does not include results from the District of Columbia, because of a lack of exit polling data. If we include DC, and assume that 100% of the voters were Democrats, Clinton still has a lead among Democrats of 333,981 votes.
But that number also doesn’t include Florida. Add in Florida’s Democrats, and Clinton’s lead advantage increases to 565,684. Nor does it include Michigan; and even if we assign all the Democrats who voted “uncommitted” to Obama, Clinton’s lead among Democratic voters grows to 678,276.
As to Super Tuesday,
In fact, on Super Tuesday, 295,952 more primary voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton than for Obama, yet somehow neither the Obama campaign, nor the media, was paying much attention to Clinton’s lead in the popular vote. If we include all the states that held primaries before Super Tuesday (NH, SC, MI, FL) Clinton was up by 468,024 votes—that was 2.51% of the total votes cast. But talking about that number was not a media priority either.
Only now that Obama has a miniscule lead of 128,736 in the number of votes cast (and that includes assigning all the “uncommitted” votes in Michigan to Obama) has the media focused on total votes cast. This lead represents less than 1% (0.62%) of votes cast in the primary elections held so far, yet it is trumpeted by the media endlessly.
Update: Paul Lukasiak responds to several of you in the comments:
First of all, I tried to be as fair as possible to Obama in putting together the data.When I include Michigan results in the totals, ALL uncommitted voters were treated as if they were Obama voters. (In the notes to the table I also mention that there was an exit poll question regarding who people would have voted for if all the candidates had been on the ballot -- and that it came out 46% Clinton, 35% Obama -- and noted that those numbers could have slightly improved Obama's bottom line, but because there were no cross tabs to party identification for those numbers, they were unusable for this project.
In the case of Washington DC, for which there was no exit polling data, I assumed that 100% of the voters would have answered "Democratic" to a "party identification" question, even though the highest percentage (from closed primaries -- like DC's -- in NY and NM) in that categories was 87%.
The purpose of the piece was not to demand that only "Democratic" voters be considered by super-delegates, but to use the analysis of Democratic voters to raise the issue of how Obama is now trying to "play the refs" after doing a very good job of exploiting the rules to his advantage. Obama is now trying to redefine the role of the superdelegates to be rubber-stamps based on the criteria that are most advantageous to him. But the fact is that those are not the only criteria, and IMHO, not even the proper criteria.
To me, the decisions of the superdelegates in a race where there is no clear winner should be to pretty much forget the results of the primaries, and consider what is best for the nation -- which means determining which democrat is most assured of winning in November, and if that determination is close, which candidate would make the best President. The fact that I think Hillary is the right choice is far less important to me than the idea that the super-delegates do the job they should be doing in a close race.
(Indeed, one critical factor that the super-delegates need to consider is who McCain will choose for VP. In my opinion, if he doesn't choose Huckabee, Obama may be the better candidate because I think he can make a number of otherwise "deep red" states at least competitive because Christian Conservative are going to be very unhappy, and Obama's message of hope and inspiration will appeal to "the better angels of their natures". )
and later in the thread,
...but Obama has been making three separate arguments (actually four, if you include the fact that his co-chair, Jesse Jackson Jr., is going to black superdelegates and asking them if they want to be the ONE person who keeps a black American from having the chance to be president) -- that total votes, total states, and pledged delegates are all important criteria.The key difference between pledged delegates and popular support (votes) is because there is no consistency between states in determining "popular support". As I point out in piece, In Idaho (a caucus state) Obama got 79% of the delegates to county conventions, and is estimated to have a +12 advantage over Clinton in delegates to the Democratic convention. In New Jersey, where over 1,100,000 people voted in the Democratic primary, and where Clinton drew 110,000 more votes than Obama (56% to 42%), she will be awarded only 11 more delegates than Obama.
Setting aside the fact that hell will freeze over before a Democrat wins in Idaho this year, the very idea that 79% of people who would have voted in a primary in Idaho would have supported Obama is completely absurd. (Even in DC, Obama only got 75%).
Another point of comparison...in 2004, only 181,000 Idahoans voted for Kerry. In other words, Clinton's advantage over Obama in New Jersey was about 60% of the total democratic vote in the 2004 general election. But if you add Clintons and Obama's NJ and ID delegates together, Obama comes out ahead by 1.
Update: Comments over 200, thread is closing. Thanks for your thoughts.)
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