"Tomorrow is the very last day Americans will have the chance to vote in this hard-fought and historic race for the Democratic nomination," reads the latest e-mail from the Clinton campaign. "Every vote we receive in South Dakota and Montana will help us add to our popular vote total." It's a little peculiar to even have to say this, but the Democratic presidential nomination is decided by delegates, not the popular vote. There's a good argument to be made that it should be decided by the popular vote, but for now, it isn't. And so both candidates pursued strategies meant to attain the necessary number of delegates. If the "votes" in the non-election in Michigan and the no-campaign election in Florida were going to matter, the two candidates would have campaigned in both places. If the popular vote was the key, the Obama camp would have ignored small state caucuses and spent that money running up their totals in larger states like Illinois. Indeed, to get a sense for how contingent it all is, head over to Poblano's place where he's got an unbelievably cool little gadget that lets you measure the popular vote while changing different assumptions and variables (like how to count Michigan, Puerto Rico, etc). All these questions and uncertainties exist because the primary process is not set up to measure the popular vote. It's set up to measure delegates. At the end of the day, you have to judge the game based on the rules set down at the beginning. Trying to decide the election based on the popular vote is like demanding that the NBA finals be decided based on which team brought more of its supporters to the arena. You can argue that that's the more relevant achievement if you want, but if that had been the metric from the beginning, then the two teams would have been out recruiting supporters and not on the court shooting free throws. The Clinton campaign is trying to change the game. But that's something you do before the season starts. Not 30 seconds before the final buzzer.
