Monday, March 10, 2008
Counting Game, part I
The Clinton campaign is trying hard to find numbers that support her as the "popular choice." One tactic is bought into by a post at talkingpointsmemo that starts with the assumption that Clinton is winning in the vote count if you ignore caucuses. This is just wrong: the New York Times has a graphic showing that Obama is ahead by 400,000 in the primary states, excluding Florida and Michigan. If you include Florida, which Clinton won by 294,000, Obama is still up by over 100,000. Granted, these numbers are incredibly close, but you can't claim to be the popular vote leader if you're second. Only if you include Michigan, where Obama wasn't even on the ballot, do you get more for Clinton. Given that Michigan is expected to break evenly when it inevitably revotes, Obama will still be ahead. There's also a post showing that Obama will almost certainly win the popular vote overall.
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2 comments:
As I posted on TPM in response to you:
"The numbers aren't wrong, they're just different than your source. I wrote this up in attempt to counter HRC's argument that she leads the pop vote. It wouldn't be as effective if I went out of my way to find a count where O leads HRC. I didn't shop the numbers, just picked the RCP numbers, which happen to support what HRC has been claiming (when you include FL & MI, or just include MI, but not FL), looking only at primaries."
At bottom, I fail to see your point. It's HRC who claims she has more pop votes, not me. Heck, I wouldn't include FL & MI and I'd include the pop vote counts from the caucuses where we have tallies. O's up by 300,000+ votes. But my point was to counter the HRC tactic of suggesting that caucuses don't count, and to see what primaries might have produced instead. The point you're trying to make is rather ho-hum, to be honest. No one seriously thinks HRC is ahead in pop votes so why spend more words trying to demonstrate what we already know is wrong?
My point is that buying into this, even for a hypothetical, is dangerous. When you start your post, you don't give a direct link to your numbers, or mention explicitly that Florida and Michigan are being counted. I would have been fine with it as an exercise if you made it very clear at the beginning that this is under the highly dubious counting that Clinton is trying to do -- I do the same thing in my next post, re Clinton's attempt to redefine "Democratic voters," but I think it's important to make it clear that the popular vote on its own does not support Clinton.
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