A note on the popular vote
The Caucus reports that Senator Clinton is “touting popular vote projections”:
Senator Hillary Clinton is keeping hope alive today with a new assessment of the popular vote that says she is poised to finish the primary season on June 3 as the winner of the overall popular vote, at least by the most inclusive measure, which would include the tallies from all states.
With her expected big win in Puerto Rico on June 1, a collection of votes could give her the popular vote lead without including the disputed results from Michigan and Florida. The Clinton campaign is circulating an opinion article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which analyzes the vote possibilities. It buttresses the heart of her new argument to the superdelegates — that if she wins the popular vote across the whole country, how can they overturn the will of the people? [Emphasis mine]
The Clinton campaign seems to think that winning the popular vote gives a considerable amount of moral heft to her claim that she ought to be the nominee, mostly by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the pledged delegate winner. And using that strategy is – I think – a legitimate route to take, especially in a contest as close as this one. But if you’re going to invoke the “will of the people” as a reason for overturning the results of the primaries (as they stand), then it’s necessary to deal fully with the implications of that choice. The most obvious being that the popular vote doesn’t actually reflect the “will of the people” in any meaningful sense. Had the popular vote been the agreed upon metric for determining the nominee, then it’s almost certain that Obama (or anyone) would have adopted a radically different strategy for the primaries. Namely, Obama would have ignored organizing the caucus states in favor of campaigning in the larger and more populous states.
More importantly is the fact that using the popular vote, as it stands, privileges primary states over caucus states. Shakesville commentor MaryL explains:
For example, NH and ME each have a population of about 1.3 million, with NH getting 22 pledged delegates and ME getting 24. If these were both primary states, comparing the popular vote totals would make some sense. But the total NH primary votes were about 216,000, while ME was one of the 4 caucus states with no released vote totals. RCP doesn’t provide an estimate for ME alone, just a lump sum of 50,000 for ME, IA, NV and WA. Maine is also the smallest of the 4 states (IA: 2.9 million; NV: 2.5 million; WA: 6.4 million).
Assuming that ME was fervent beyond measure, let’s give them, say, 12,000 of that 50,000 — compared to the 216,000 counted for their neighbor NH. But the ME raw popular vote may actually be as low as 5,000 if you apportion that lump 50,000 among the 4 caucus states in proportion to their population.
216,000/12,000 = 18 In this scenario, NH carries 18 times the power of ME.
216,000/5000 = 42 In this scenario, NH carries 42 times the power of ME.In fact, those 4 caucus states, with a total population of 13.1 million, have a raw popular vote estimate that is just a quarter the size of NH’s recorded raw popular vote. Counting the popular vote instead of delegates makes tiny NH 4 times as important as ME, NV, IA and WA combined. Rinse and repeat for various comparisons of caucus and primary states. This isn’t apples and oranges; this is raspberries and cantaloupes.
If the Clinton campaign were to fully acknowledge the implications of using the popular vote as a moral argument for determining the nominee, then they would quickly find that doing so dramatically blunts the moral impact of their argument, taking the wind from their sails and leaving them with only one real (well, positive-sum) option: ending the campaign.
