Obama wins the delegates but Hillary wins the popular vote?
Slate's Tim Noah on how politics IS beanbag.
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Archivists block release of Clinton papers
(note: the ARCHIVIST is hand pivked Clinton aide Bruce Linday) 
But Clinton is winning the Joe Lieberman Award! for her trashing Obama and praising McCain.
Marc, the only way the popular vote is close is because MI and FL are included and WA, IA, ME, and NV are excluded as is the case with the numbers Hillary is using. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_vote_count.html Obema is going to win the popular vote and the pledged delegate count. OH and TX were her big opportunities to really close the popular vote gab and she did not do enough to sustain through the end.
Marc do you understand that Obama is ahead on all fronts [even counting Michigan and Florida] and likely to stay that way? More importantly do you understand that a) the Clinton campaign is trying to lure away inattentive fence sitters with this unity ticket nonsense and b) the RFK wing of the Democratic Party Obama represents doesn’t like the McGovern wing of party that Clinton represents? And why would we, the republicans have beaten the entire party for years with McGovern’s flaws. No one ever called freedom riders wimps. By the way, there are four wings of the Democratic Party, not two, [a Labor wing, a McGovern wing, an RFK wing and an African American Wing] which is why the primary season has been 51/49.
Yeah, but what about caucus states, such as Iowa, that don't even report their popular vote totals, ever? If it comes down to that, those states need to be forced to reveal their popular vote totals.
The rules of the Democratic nominating process are based on delegate counts, not popular vote count.
Suze is exactly right. Further. There are pre-agreed rules governing the contest for delegates. There is no pre-agreed metric for measuring the popular vote.
Super delegates won't openly flaunt the Party rules and say it should be decided by the popular vote. So let's put that to rest. However, they can use the popular vote in their own calculus. I doubt seriously that they would include MI (without a redo)in their personal calculus. Further, they may not know the popular votes in Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington. But they know that Obama won three (two in blow-outs), and the loss in NV was close. Even if you include FL (as is or as a redo), unless, Hillary blows Obama out in a Michigan redo she will not be able to catch him in the popular vote.
That's like the complaining that goes on when a president is elected because he won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. Rules are rules. I also think superdelegates will be swayed by a lot of other things, such as the perceived strength of a candidate's coattails and their fundraising success.
Kim has it right - In any imaginable case the superdelegates will choose the winner. And - guess what - superdelegates are supposed to use their independent judgment. Granted, they are unlikely to overturn the will of the people, but Marc's question is a good one: what if "the will of the people" is different depending on whether you look at pledged delegates or actual votes? I think in that case (or in the case of one candidate having only a very slim lead in both pledged delegates and votes) the candidates will spend the entire summer trying to woo individual supers and the nomination won't be decided until convention time.
In a way, popular vote is just another way to say caucuses shouldn't count. A caucus is bound to get less turnout then a primary (you must be there at a specific time). Still popular vote gives them cover to make the choice.
If HRC is ahead in popular vote, but OBama is ahead in delegates, who do you think Gore will side with?
Hey Marc, So long as your demonstrating once again your penchant for considering hypotheticals whose aim is to give the increasingly ugly and spastic Clinton campaign legitimacy, here's another! What if Obama leads in delegates and overall popular vote (so far as it can be determined--see above) but Clinton leads the popular vote among registered Democrats who are female whites earning less than $50,000 a year and national security minded Latinos who inhabit crucial states such as California, New York, New Jersey and Ohio that are necessary for a Democratic victory in November? What will the party do then, Marc? Oh, the horror! the horror!
This is an easy one: the candidate with the requisite number of delegate votes wins, regardless of how that happened. The only possible way this question is even difficult is if you change it to the following: suppose one candidate wins more pledged delegates but not enough to win the nomination without some superdelegate votes, and the other candidate wins more popular votes? Now, as others are pointing out, there is no real metric of popular votes, and in any event any reasonable estimate of the popular vote suggests this state of affairs is unlikely. But hypothetically, the answer is that it depends on the superdelegates. What people tend to forget, however, is that the superdelegates are not in fact endowed with heroic voting powers--they just get one vote a piece, and there are far fewer of them than there are pledged delegates. So, the superdelegates can't automatically overrule the pledged delegates. Accordingly, the answer to this question is that assuming all the delegates vote for either Candidate A or Candidate B, and assuming a positive margin of X for Candidate A among pledged delegates, Candidate B would have to get a positive margin of X+1 among the superdelegates to win the nomination (on the strength of whatever arguments Candidate B could muster, including this hypothetical popular vote advantage). If Candidate B instead got a positive margin of less than X among the superdelegates, then Candidate A would still win. Or, in other words, the candidate with the requisite number of delegates wins, regardless of how that happened.
I'm almost shocked by some of the comments above. Neither candidate is going to win with just regular delagates. How in the world does the party of "all votes should count the same" and "Gore got more" argue against the total vote winner in that situation? Obama will probably get more total votes and make this moot, but if he doesn't, he can't be the nominee. If he can't even win a majority of Democrats (defined as dems plus independents who voted in the primaries), how is he going to win a majority of all voters? And here's an easy metric for the four caucus states that don't reveal total votes: pro-rata their delagate counts by the state's population and presume their turnout is the average of all 50 states' turnout.
Further. There are pre-agreed rules governing the contest for delegates. There is no pre-agreed metric for measuring the popular vote. Exactly right, which means the superdelegates can taken into consideration anything they want, including the popular vote, whether or not there's "a pre-agreed metric" for counting it. Marc do you understand that Obama is ahead on all fronts [even counting Michigan and Florida] and likely to stay that way? Not true. Counting Michigan and Florida, Hillary Clinton hold a lead of about 100,000 popular votes. If you take away Michigan, Obama takes the lead, by about 1 percentage point of the 25 million odd votes cast.
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In any imaginable case the superdelegates will choose the winner.
If they are smart, they'll pick Obama, for the future and to get African Americans to vote in November.
Your objectivity is...useless. The only question is are Dem superdelegates so stupid to nominate HRC?
I think not, but this is politics after all.
Posted by Kim | March 7, 2008 8:12 AM