Estimate w/ FL, MI, IA, NV, ME, WA
Obama 17,014,911 (47.7%)
Clinton 16,934,160 (47.5%)
Spread Obama +80,751 +0.22%
If you're going to count MI and FL in the spirit of not disenfranchising voters, then have the decency to count IA, NV, ME, and WA. Or do they not count?
Source: RCP
That makes sense...
By some measures, I heard the caucus votes were not being counted and that MI was only counted for Clinton, so I was curious....
IIRC, the caucus votes are counted in states that provided a tally. Not all of them did. I know there is considerable discussion and analysis of this on TalkLeft if you want to know more.
IA, NV, ME, and WA amount to 27 electoral votes, the same about as FL.
Does that MI count include 0 for Obama, or does it give him all the Uncommitted votes?
Any popular vote count that pretends that Obama has no supporters in the state of Michigan is automatically bogus.
but Clinton supporters would have us believe that they care about the voters of MI and FL, it's all about voter disenfranchisement they say... yet in the same breath, they manage to discount the caucus states that didn't report popular vote totals. This to me is the epitome of hypocrisy.
I worry that, this year, of all years, with what just happened in Indiana, people are tossing around the word disenfranchisement without knowing what it actually means.
It's when you dis some enfras then you enchisement them.
I could go for some enfras this time of night. It's a shame I don't have any cash...
You have to pay for your enfras?
LOSER!
Of course I pay for them. The guy who sells them to me would go broke if I just stole them from him.
Here we have the perfect example of the Obama campaign's commitment to democracy.
***A
You should present the complete facts. The sourced data you cite from RCP states the following: ". . . The estimate from these four Caucus states where there are not official popular vote numbers increases Senator Obama's popular vote margin by 110,224. This number would be about 50,000 less if the Washington primary results from February 19th were used instead of the Washington Caucus results."
Adjusting for the fudged ~50k the numbers show:
Obama 16,964,911 Clinton 16,934,160
While Obama still slightly ahead since it's an "estimate", statistically it amounts to little more than a rounding error.
1) I trust your ability to click (which you have done). So I hid no sources from you
2) Since Obama leads by what amounts to a "rounding error", let's stop with the "Hillary is leading the popular vote"
To a lazy simpleton like me, but maybe not to other lazy simpletons with which your obscurity of the facts may have been overlooked.
Seriously, chill. Until you go bother everyone who simply claims that a candidate is leading the popular vote without sources or links, please stop making a big deal out of nothing.
I go watch some TV now. cheers.
toodle loo!
lol! This was a pretty funny exchange. Mojo'd both.
Why on earth should he get all the uncommitted voters? Many of these voters would have voted for Edwards or Biden or someone else. Obama voluntarily chose to take his name off the ballot, in part to curry the favor with Iowa caucus voters -- and to that extent, his strategy probably succeeded. But while it may have seemed like a wise move at the time, it turned out to be foolish, just as the Clinton campaign's decision to focus on the big states and not pay sufficient attention to the smaller caucus states turned out to be extremely foolish. And just as Hillary has to live with her mistakes, Obama should have to live with his.
He should have to live with his mistakes; and he does. Our point is that it is patently dishonest of the Hillary Campaign to pretend as though Obama deserves to have no support from Michigan.
Not that it matters since the popular vote DOES NOT MATTER.
A poster on TPM made the good analogy: adding popular votes for all primaries and caucuses without adjustment is like adding fractions by blithely summing both numerators and denominators. It just doesn't work.
In the nomination contest, some states have primaries open to all voters; some states only allow those who register as Democrats 60 days in advance; and some only allow those who voted Democratic in the last election. Then the caucus states: some report their counts and some don't. And what about the state that had both primaries and a caucus (TX, WA, NE)? Also, how do you handle the reality that fewer voters attend caucuses? Example: in WA state, 32,000 Dem caucus attendees cast votes, but in the (non-binding) primary 691,000 voted, a ratio of 21.6 to 1 primary to caucus voters. In Nebraska, the ratio was 2.5 to 1. (Yes, some of you think caucuses are unfair. Great -- get involved with the DNC and change the rules, but whinging about that now is pointless.)
How in the world do you reconcile all the different methods of selection? You could add all the primary votes, with an adjustment factor for the number of non-Democratic votes, plus the caucus votes of states that reported times a "participation" factor, plus a historical figure for the caucuses that didn't vote. Gets pretty complicated, eh? And just like now, you'd get a hundred different counts, each depending on the assumptions and prejudices of the compiler.
But guess what? You don't have to construct a complicated formula to tally popular votes! It's already been done -- that's what delegates are for! Delegates are the common denominator used to normalize the vote counts between different states and territories. Read that sentence again. And again.
The delegate system was designed so that states had the latitude to settle upon a candidate using their own method, based on preference or history, and still have the national party be able to agree on a final, unambiguous tally. The delegate allocations establish an "exchange rate" between the different jurisdictions. By that analogy, anyone using popular votes to compare the WA and CA results is asking you to trade Yen and Euros on a 1:1 basis -- don't do it! (Unless you hold the Yen....)
at this point that the diarist will not engage this conversation further. She will merrily tell you that Clinton leads in the popular vote, but methodology is beyond her.
After all, she's just gathering talking points from the Clinton campaign.
