popular votes

Heard today on NPR while driving in the car (hey, give me a volvo and a latte and I'll be the perfect Democrat) a discussion of Clinton's claims to be winning the popular vote. The host interviewed someone from Real Clear Politics, to get, well if not to the bottom of the matter, at least part of the way down. The guest explained that RCP currently has six--six!--different counters to measure the popular vote. (You can see them all here.)

There are two reasons for these multiple counts. First, some of the states which held caucuses (in particular, Iowa, Maine, Nevada, and Washington) did not report official vote totals. So some of RCP's counts include estimates for these states (giving Obama a ~110,000 vote advantage, though this would be only +60,000 if you used the Washington unofficial primary instead of the official caucus--see the bottom of the linked page for more info) while others do not.

Secondly, Obama's name was not on the ballot in Michigan--he removed it at the behest of the DNC establishment. Clinton has tried to spin this as Obama's fault ('we all had the choice to leave our name on, but he chose not to') but when she was asked about it by a New Hampshire voter back in February, she claimed that she had only left her name on the ballot so as not to alienate Michigan voters from the Democratic Party in the general election. Don't read anything serious into it, she said. Meanwhile, when Michigan voted, some 238,000 people marked "uncommitted" on their ballots, which RCP codes as Obama votes in some scenarios.

Anyway, if you include Clinton's Michigan votes but exclude uncommitted voters and the caucus votes, Clinton is ahead by nearly 200,000 votes. This is her best case scenario, obviously. Obama wins the popular vote if you include the caucuses, so long as you don't count Clinton's Michigan votes without giving Obama credit for the 'uncommitted.'

So, what's the point? Two things:

First, Clinton should really stop claiming that she "is winning" the popular vote. The nominee is decided by delegates, which Obama is clearly going to win. The only point in even discussing the popular vote is to try to ascertain some sort of general public opinion, and it's clear that a (slight) majority of primary voters went to the polls favoring Barack Obama. I heard Jake Tapper later on another NPR show arguing that Clinton needs to give up her argument because when (not if) Obama takes the nomination, it will weaken the Democratic nominee by suggesting that he lacks full party support.

Second, this has been a really, really close election. So close, in fact, that I didn't begrudge Clinton's strategy of trying to "steal" the nomination by appealing to super-delegates who would "overturn" the will of the voters. (Once it became clear that this was not going to be a successful strategy, she should have quit, or at least lowered her profile, but that's another matter). Considering the low turnout of primaries and especially of caucuses (seriously, how many people turned out in Idaho? 15,000?) I don't think we can really say for certain that either candidate is favored by a majority of Democrats. It's just too close.

Still, rules are rules, and Obama won the thing fair and square. Clinton needs to stop disparaging the legitimacy of the process, unless she wants to see a McCain presidency.

UPDATE: At the New Republic Christopher Orr makes the Clintonian case for the Pistons:

Once you abandon the artificial four-games-to-two framework that the media has tried to impose on the series, a very different picture emerges, with the Celtics leading by a mere 549 points to 539. Yes that’s right, the margin between the two teams is less than one percent—a tie, for all intents and purposes.

(hat tip to Matthew Yglesias)