Well, If By “50/50″ You Mean Losing, Then Yes
This must be some sort of parody, because any other explanation of Jeralyn’s post asking “Who’s Winning the Popular Vote Total” vote reflects very poorly on her intellectual honesty. The post attempts to answer the question for the Democratic primary and comes to the absurd conclusion that, rounded to the nearest one percent, that Clinton and Obama are tied (even according to her calculations, Obama’s up about. But let’s go through all the ways Jeralyn tries to obscure the truth, namely that Obama is solidly ahead in the popular vote, and will probably win.
The first problem with the entire exercise is Jeralyn’s initial question. She asks “So, how many human beings have gone to the polls so far and cast votes for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?” Starting from there, we know something is screwy. Because the question isn’t how many people have voted for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, but how many people voted for one candidate as opposed to the other.
Jeralyn, by phrasing the question that way, gets to sneak in Clinton’s votes in Florida and Michigan. While it’s true that Florida and Michigan voters affirmatively expressed their preference for Clinton, these were also two sui generis primaries. Why Michigan ought not to count in popular vote totals is obvious. Obama, the current leader in the popular votes and pledged delegates, was not even on the ballot. While someone could say “but they still expressed a clear preference for Clinton,” that’s obscuring how voting works.
That’s because a voter’s preference for Clinton could be clearly affected by Obama being on the ballot. Michigan, by not having Obama on the ballot, was different from every other state and surely should not count in any popular vote totals, unless you wanted to make the race look a lot closer than it actually was.
Florida is a bit more tricky. Both Clinton and Obama were on the ballot, but because the DNC had stripped Florida’s delegates, Obama followed their dictate and didn’t campaign there. What exactly is the purpose of a a sanction if you still give the state the gift of a candidate time and pandering? And so Clinton won by a fairly large margin. But, like Michigan, it was an odd contest.
How can we say that Florida should be included in the same pool of states where either Clinton and Obama campaigned against each other or didn’t, but only out of strategic considerations (like Illinois or Arkansas)? It’s absurd to say that the result in Florida is even approximating the true preferences of the Florida electorate. In most states, Clinton started out with a big lead, which was then whittled down by Obama due to his campaigning. There was no Obama campaign in Florida, however.
These counting shenanigans are not inconsequential. Adding in the Michigan vote gives Clinton a 328,000 vote boost, which translates to a more than one percent increase in her total. The Florida vote margin, roughly 288,000, gives Clinton almost another one percent boost. So what the results should really say is that Obama, in contests that followed the rules and were “normal,” has a lead of about 51.3 percent to Clinton’s 48.7. Sure, that doesn’t look like a big margin, but considering that Clinton would have to win a 14% margin in the rest of the primaries to take the popular vote lead (or a 9% margin with Florida included), it’s a rather huge gap.
