Mark Blumenthal has a great primer on counting the popular vote in presidential primaries. Short version? Its far more complicated that the Clinton campaign wants you to think:
"More people have now voted for me than have voted for my opponent," she told the "Today Show"'s Matt Lauer. The Clinton campaign backed up that assertion by pointing to one vote count maintained by RealClearPolitics that includes the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries (Obama received zero votes in Michigan, because his name did not appear on the ballot) but excludes estimates of the preferences of caucus participants in four states carried by Obama (Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington) that provided no official vote count.
Obama responded to Clinton's comment by suggesting that the delegate count itself is the best measure of the popular will."The way the popular vote is translated is into delegates," he said. "That's how these primaries and these caucuses work... the number of votes you get then speaks to how many delegates you get."
Two weeks ago, I reviewed the problems of "measurement error" inherent in attempting to count the votes cast in the Democratic contest. A spreadsheet compiled by RealClearPolitics' Jay Cost, for example, shows 15 different ways to count the "popular vote," with candidate margins varying by roughly 700,000 votes depending on whether and how to measure preferences in Florida and Michigan and the four caucus states that did not provide official popular vote counts.
But the issue is broader than just the measurement error in the vote count, the issue I focused on previously. It also extends to what a pollster might call "concept validity." That's a wonky term that simply means that before measuring something we ought to define clearly what it is we are trying to measure.
Of course, we should have no illusions. The candidates and their supporters are less concerned about the philosophy of which votes to count than with emphasizing whatever measure works in their favor. Combatants on both sides of the argument, however, seem to agree that the principles of democracy and popular will are paramount.
Clinton supporter Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa., for example, has condemned caucuses as "undemocratic." Appearing on "Meet the Press," he argued that in caucuses, "older people can't vote, older people who vote by absentee ballot... if you're a shift worker and a lot of our workers, because they're low-income workers, are shift workers, you can't vote in a caucus."
Obama supporters, on the other hand, point to a paper [PDF] by author Glenn Hurowitz and business school professor Gregory Nini asserting that a popular vote tally "dramatically devalues the popular will" of voters living in caucus states precisely because of the much lower turnout in caucuses. The 13 caucus states (which Obama won by an average margin of 35 percentage points) represent 15 percent of eligible voters and 14 percent of Democratic delegates, but only 2 percent of the popular vote cast. Had the caucus states held primaries, Hurowitz and Nini argue, Obama's victory margins would have been diminished, but his raw popular vote tally would be significantly increased because of much higher turnouts.
One inescapable reality is that any effort to fairly count the popular will of the electorate involves some degree of hypothetical "what-if." What if the Florida and Michigan primaries had been officially sanctioned? What if Obama's name were on the ballot in Michigan? What if the caucus states had held primaries?
Here's how I set down my thoughts in a recent email to one of my BU readers:
1. The rules established and agreed to in advance by the candidates say nothing whatsoever about popular vote totals. This is party because the nomination is decided by state contests, and partly because in caucus states it is almost impossible to gauge popular vote totals. Thus, aside from being irrelevant to the rules of the game, Clinton's popular vote lead only exists if you do not include people who participated in the caucuses. Or to put it another way, it only exists if you disenfranchise the population of multiple states!
2. If you are going to count Michigan, because Obama played by the rules (there they are again!) and removed his name from the ballot, you must give all of the uncommitted votes to him. If we're going to agree to break the rules because one of the candidates did not follow them, it makes no sense to punish the person who followed them and reward the one who broke them. And once again there is the issue of "disenfranchisement" of all of the voters who chose uncommitted. If we don't assign them to Obama, their vote was meaningless.3. Even assuming you could solve these first two problems, I don't understand what additional information the popular vote total is supposed to provide. Remember - we don't elect our president by the cumulative popular vote either! Saying that Al Gore won more votes than Bush in 2000 is a nice talking point, but it had no bearing whatsoever on who became president. What we need is a candidate who knows how to build a winning campaign around the actual rules of the game, and not won who can claim that if the rules were different they would have won. We tried that in 2000, and it gave us 8 years of W. Why Clinton thinks that strategy makes any sense whatsoever is a complete mystery to me.
I have to admit - Obama's team has done a disastrous job of framing this fight. In fact, I'd argue that they haven't even bothered to try, which is why the rule breakers (Clinton, FL Dems, and MI Dems) have been able to dominate the debate with so much nonsense.
The short version is that this is all nonsense. The only way Clinton can win is if she can convince the people in her party to change the rules - rules she agreed to in advance - on her behalf. It really is that simple.
UPDATE: Here's Andrew Romano's take:
Yesterday, we reported that former DNC chairman--and current Clinton adviser--Terry McAuliffe appeared on MSNBC mere seconds after Clinton won Pennsylvania's primary and announced that she "will have moved ahead in the popular vote... by the time we finish this process." Now the campaign is saying she's already there. According to my colleague Suzanne Smalley, Clinton's aides staked out the aisle of the press plane yesterday morning and proclaimed that with Pennsylvania's big victory, Clinton had finally won more votes, overall, than Barack Obama. And on the stump in Indianapolis, the candidate herself chimed in. "I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anyone else," she said.
Is this true? Sure--if you ignore (or, to put it less mildly, disenfranchise) hundreds of thousands of likely Obama voters. Here's why: any vote tally that shows Clinton in the lead has to include Michigan; without it, she trails by at least 200,000. The problem is, while Clinton won 328,309 votes in the Great Lakes state, Obama got zero. That's because his name wasn't even listed on the ballot. On Jan. 19, Michiganders had two choices: Clinton or "uncommitted." And while "uncommitted" earned about 45 percent of the vote, it's impossible to determine what portion of that bloc backed Obama and what portion backed John Edwards, whose name was also absent. Talk about fuzzy math.Of course, Clinton doesn't really care about the numerical nitty-gritty.The point of emphasizing the popular vote--which, as I wrote yesterday, is impossible to count accurately, considering that several caucus states don't even keep track of it--isn't to settle on a mathematically sound tally and suggest that it should replace delegates as the proper metric for determining the Democratic nomination. Clinton knows that the rules won't change mid-game. But she also knows that neither she nor Obama can reach a delegate-majority on pledged delegates alone--which means that the superdelegates will inevitably have to put one of them over the top. Right now, they're breaking for Obama, who has an unshakable lead in the pledged delegate count; to do otherwise at this point would risk contradicting the "will of the people." But superdelegates are free to decide however they want; them's the rules, too. And if Clinton can convince these party poo-bahs that she's won the popular vote--even if it's a (necessarily) incomplete, imprecise or selective approximation--then maybe they'll consider her the "people's choice" and have some political cover for committing.
Or so the thinking goes. Yesterday on Air Hillary, aides originally added two caveats to their claim that Clinton was leading Obama in the popular vote: 1) that Florida and Michigan should count and 2) that the 12 caucus states should not. When a reporter accused them of "making up a metric," they checked their math--and discovered that (counting Florida and Michigan) Clinton was ahead by 12,000 even with the caucus states included. Which only proves my point. Team Clinton is perfectly willing to erase whole states to make their case; they're making up favorable ways to count the uncountable popular vote as they go along. In other words, it's not the math that matters. It's the mirage.
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