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Some of you objected to my popular vote post from earlier today, and argued that Clinton's case is subtler than I'm giving her credit for. Nate W. stated this most persuasively:
Sure, the nomination is decided by delegates. And in this case, since the two remaining candidates have split the pledged delegates fairly equally, the nomination will be decided by the superdelegates, who may cast their votes for whomever they want, using whatever criteria they wantClinton's strategy (or one of them) for the last few weeks has been to argue that the candidate who receives the most votes in the primaries represents the considered choice of the rank and file of the party and that superdelegates should thus cast their vote with that candidate.There are a couple points to be made here. First, I don't think of this as a particularly pro-Obama argument. If you run the popular vote numbers such that you include Florida, include Puerto Rico, include caucus states, and exclude Michigan (where no one campaigned and only Clinton was on the ballot), Obama is way ahead. If you bend common sense to the degree that you count Michigan, and count uncommitteds for Obama, Obama remains ahead by 46,000 votes. And tonight, he's likely to pick up even more votes. Clinton's last hope was for high turnout in Puerto Rico, but as Bloomberg says, that didn't happen. So this isn't about who won the popular vote. Obama did.Even so, the argument remains important. This process, above all, should be legitimate, and future candidates, when they begin their campaigns, should be clear on what they're trying to achieve. Delegate math is complicated, organizing caucuses is expensive, and a fair argument can be made that the popular vote is a superior measure. If that's the belief, then the 49-or-so percent of the party that voted for Clinton should push the Democratic National Committee to change the way the primaries are judged. But a campaign meant to capture delegates and a campaign meant to rack up high popular vote totals are very different campaigns that require different strategies and different allocations of resources. A popular vote campaign, for instance, would suggest that candidates should aggressively contest big states even if they're certain to lose them, because such states are vote-rich environs. On the other hand, they should probably ignore Montana and Wyoming. A delegate-oriented campaign needs to organize caucuses and small states. But you have to choose one, because the popular vote count doesn't make sense in a delegate-oriented primary, and delegate-superiority doesn't make sense in a popular vote based election.
