Popular Vote Counts

by: Chris Bowers

Mon Feb 11, 2008 at 13:37


Here are four different ways to count the current popular vote in the Democratic presidential nomination campaign. All of the data used to compile these numbers can be found in a document created for Open Left here:

Popular Vote Counts, 2008 Democratic Presidential Nomination Campaign.

1. Straight And Narrow Count
Popular votes plus state delegates, FL and MI not included
Obama: 8,119,171
Clinton: 7,916,422

2. Broadest Possible Count
Popular votes, plus Florida, plus estimated popular support in state delegate states, plus estimated Michigan results with Obama on ballot
Clinton: 9,233,213
Obama: 9,183,338

3. Best Obama Count
Popular votes plus estimated popular support in state delegate states
Obama: 8,394,947
Clinton: 8,109,228

4. Best Clinton Count
Popular votes plus state delegates plus Florida plus Michigan with zero for Obama
Clinton: 9,101,781
Obama: 8,688,212

I will update these numbers as the process moves forward. Other combination are possible, but these are the four where I will focus.

Update: Thanks to everyone who pointed out flaws in the comments. The post and document have both been updated to take those corrections into account.  

Chris Bowers :: Popular Vote Counts

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Popular Vote Counts | 31 comments
Option 2 with Tuesday Projections (0.00 / 0)
Based on current polling and past turnout trends, what are your projections for the net increase in Obama's totals after the Potomac primaries? +50k? +100k? More?
Good job! (0.00 / 0)
Thx, Chris, must have been a lot of work! Much appreciated!
:-)
Alaska (0.00 / 0)
Chris, the Alaska Dems website appears to list the actual number of caucus supporters for each candidate, so there is no need to extrapolate from turnout.

http://www.alaskademocrats.org/

thanks! (0.00 / 0)
also, we have different numbers for Maine. Yours are higher than mine, which I gathered from the Maine Dem website. Where did you get yours?
[ Parent ]
Portland Press Herald (0.00 / 0)
estimated turnout at "more than 46,000" here: http://pressherald.mainetoday....

Not sure why they have a different number than the Maine Dems. I guess the Maine Dem number is probably more accurate, unless  the Press Herald is included the "approximately 4,000 absentee ballots" and the Maine Dem site is not.

[ Parent ]
I vote for number 2 (0.00 / 0)
Good job with these numbers.  They will come in handy as we get down to super delegates deciding their votes at the end.  Personally, I think #2 is the most accurate and useful of the numbers.  Hopefully, whoever wins the pledged delegate race also wins all 4 of these calculations.
Yeah, (0.00 / 0)
I think this might be a good way to determine whether there are superdelegate shenanigans--if these totals continue to have a margin that is in the singe digit percentage of the votes cast, and to disagree with each other, I can't say that I'll be particularly offended if the supers become a tiebreaker.
[ Parent ]
The Audacitry of Doom (4.00 / 4)

The single funniest thing, best thing this election!

Viral!!

Brilliant.

cougfh, Thank you for the anaysis Chris, thanks for the numbers.

--

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky

Off topic, but (0.00 / 0)
essential viewing on a gloomy (around here, at least) Monday morning. Damn thing reminded me again why we don't open videos on the computer while drinking tea. Thanks gods for paper towels.
[ Parent ]
Utah (0.00 / 0)
You have the Utah numbers flipped, should be 70,373 Obama and 48,719 Clinton.
This nomination (4.00 / 1)
is a contest for Pledged Delegates.

The candidates agreed to a set of rules for this contest ahead of time.

No one campaigned in MI or FL per those rules. Counting those votes in an ad hoc tally flies in the face of the reality that no one campaigned in those states and there is no agreed upon way to measure the "popular vote."

Ad hoc popular vote measurements, as well, disenfranchise caucus goers.

Chris, your post highlights the weakness of popular vote discussions: there IS NO pre-agreed upon way to measure the popular vote. Your measurements are on the fly.

There are a clear set of rules for how we measure delegates. Delegates are how we chose the nominee.

The leader in Pledged Delegates has the simplest and most clear argument for the nomination of the Party.

Super delegates should rally behind the candidate who wins the contest for Pledged Delegates by the rules that all sides agreed to ahead of time.

That argument doesn't make sense (0.00 / 0)
The candidates agreed upon a set of rules before the election => those rules then mean that the nomination is a contest to tally as many pledged delegates and superdelegates as possible, not counting the pledged delegates from MI and FL.  That's the only way to read the rules that were set up before the election.  If we're just arguing based on what the rules are, and not inventing on the fly arguments, then the supers should do whatever the hell they want.  
[ Parent ]
Super Delegates (0.00 / 0)
cast a public vote seated with their state delegations.

The vote is public.

It comes after the primaries have taken their course.

Yes, Super Delegates are Unrepresentative delegates and are not bound to a candidate.

However, having their votes be public and come after the Pledged Delegates are chosen implies a STRONG argument for their proper role: to rally the party behind the winner of the Pledged Delegates and obviate controversies like the train wreck that is MI and FL.

Think of it this way. Would you be comfortable if the Super Delegates voted FIRST and in SECRET?

They don't. For a reason. They sit with their state, and cast their vote in public at the convention.

That's politics. I am pretty convinced the Supers will not violate their duty to uphold the will the Pledged Delegates.

Either candidate could yet win that majority. That means something.

[ Parent ]
If their role is to 'rally around the PD winner' (0.00 / 0)
what's the point?  Why not declare candidate getting the majority of pledged delegates the winner, and only give supers a vote on the second ballot?  

You can argue that's what they should do, and that that would be the ethical thing to do, but with the undemocratic nature of caucuses (which is also a public vote, by the way), the absurd nineteenth century apportionment methodology for transferring popular votes into pledged delegates, and the MI/FL disaster, If the PD total is within 100 votes, I honestly don't see the problem with having the supers swing the election, particularly if different means of estimating the popular vote total produce different popular vote winners.  

As you said, those are the rules that the candidates agreed to on day one, and it involved nothing about the supers swinging toward the pledged delegate winner.  The rules actually allow them to vote as a bloc to swing the election, even when not very close.  You can argue that they should do something different, but as Chris said in the next post, this argument has nothing to do with 'the rules the candidates agreed to before the elction.'

[ Parent ]
Yes, what's the point? (0.00 / 0)
What is there role then?  Perhaps when the DNC set up this system back in the 70's they really felt they could get away with having the superdelegates select the nominee if one candidate didn't get enough votes to make them irrelevant.

Do you honestly think the superdelegates going against the delegate count, even if it is less than 100, is going to improve the party's chances in the general?  This is the one result that the media will spin as a 'coup' for weeks.

It seems most media outlets are now even starting to show the pledged delegate totals alongside the total delegate totals and they are running articles about a potential superdelegate showdown.  Unless either candidate runs away with this, the media is chomping at the bit to have this be a brokered convention and probably already have their headlines in place should the superdelegates swing the nomination.

While the rules matter, the fact that they may have been followed won't matter a hill of beans to voters should the media decide (and they will) to play this up.

[ Parent ]
Less than 100 pledged delegates = a tie (0.00 / 0)
 The process that transfers popular will into pledged delegates is simply not that accurate.  The primary process is awful, and a really vague way of transferring votes into delegates, but every election probably should have some sort of notion of a tie.  'Count every vote' (which is blatantly false in this case) is an impossible standard.  This process at least has a built-in tiebreaker method.

To use a metaphor, this process uses a ruler without any markings on it to measure quarter inches.  If it turns out that we have a distance that's a half foot, great.  If not, then having a tiebreaker system in place isn't the worst thing in the world.

[ Parent ]
Agreed (0.00 / 0)
I think if the superdelegates swing anything over 2 or 3% to the person in second, the media goes nuts.

I am not sure if just getting to the point where superdelegates and/or FL and MI could affect the decision is enough to irreparably harm our chances in November, but if either one does actually swing the nomination the media won't let the electorate forget it.

[ Parent ]
Kind of transparent, no? (0.00 / 0)
The nomination is a contest for delegates, pledged or super.  Those are the rules.

As progressives, we should support the idea that the super delegates line up behind whoever has the more legitimate democratic mandate from the voters.  To say that the popular vote shouldn't count in determining who holds that mandate is ridiculous, especially when pledged delegates themselves (the other option) have their own intrinsic issues as a measure of the will of the voters.

John McCain: Health insurance for low income children represents an "unfunded liability."

[ Parent ]
The question is how do you measure (0.00 / 0)
the popular vote?

Chris can't give us one agreed upon metric because there ISN'T one. It's multiple choice!

There is no agreed upon rule to measure the popular vote. To suggest otherwise is preposterous. What do you do with caucus states? What do you do with states where no one campaigned? You can't measure if you don't have the same yardstick.

There is, however, one agreed upon way to measure the votes of delegates and that is a ballot at the National Convention.

We choose our nominee based on delegates chosen by rules established ahead of time. Pledged Delegates are the agreed-upon measurement of the will of the electorate. Super Delegates can and should rally to the candidate who wins that contest.

Your argument fails on that point.

If this were a popular vote battle, then there would be no reason to court voters in all those outlying congressional districts where Democrats are fighting to gain a foothold.

Further, the allocation of campaign resources would go to moving up the popular vote count and NOT towards winning delegates.

Super Delegates get this. They know that the campaigns are competing in a contest for pledged delegates in every Congressional District in the United States. That is good for our party.

The campaigns get this and understand. If this were a popular vote contest, both campaigns would have run things very differently. It's not.

We choose our nominee based on delegates to the convention. Super Delegates should look at who is the leader by the agreed upon rules and rally to that candidate at the appropriate time on the principle of fairness and the good of the party.

[ Parent ]
What are we measuring and what are our values? (0.00 / 0)
"Pledged Delegates are the agreed-upon measurement of the will of the electorate."

Agreed upon by whom?  Do you think when the system was designed that they phrased it in this way?

The delegate system is a way of keeping score, emerging out of a set of political compromises.  That is not the same as a measurement of the will of the electorate, which is a much more abstract principle.

If indeed this is a question of values in the end, as Chris claims and with which I agree, our overriding concern must be with the idea of a popular mandate.  Both pledged delegates and the popular vote are imperfect measures for capturing that concept, but both are valid for consideration.

I would take your arguments more seriously if it seems liked you were making any attempt at all to rise above simply looking at this from a pro-Obama position.  In these debates I see Hillary supporters taking a lot of stances that are damaging to her chances, such as agreeing that superdelegates should not decide the nomination if Obama has a true popular mandate.  To be honest, I don't see the same thing from you or many other Obama supporters.

John McCain: Health insurance for low income children represents an "unfunded liability."

[ Parent ]
I wholeheartedly disagree (0.00 / 0)
the only path to the nomination for Senator Obama has been to win states, win delegates, win caucuses and marshall his resources to maximize his wins in CDs all over the USA.

He started with a Super Delegate deficit over 100 strong and the press reported that as a settled fact giving voters the impression that Clinton has won more races in this primary.

He observed the rules in FL and MI even though the candidate with name recognition...and a ballot measure drawing senior citizens to the polling place...gave her huge "wins" in MI and FL that were celebrated as victories. (Ask Simon Rosenberg what he thought of that moment in FL.)

There is still one way that either side could win this nomination with the mantle of legitimacy and without the intervention of the Credentials Committee or the Super Delegates and that would be clear cut wins of Pledged Delegates in the upcoming states.

That path is equally open to Senators Clinton and Obama and always has been.

For Barack Obama that is his ONLY path to the nomination and always has been.

Remember, this primary season was not set up to favor him...and yet he competed by the rules.

Yes, I am an Obama supporter, but I am clear eyed that we might yet lose in the contest of states.

I'll be damned if I concede some sort of moral equivalence between the campaigns however. And I won't concede an inch of the hard work hundreds of thousands of volunteers and donors have poured into this effort on all sides.

For their sake, the sake of the activist base, I think respecting the Pledged Delegates and the rules must be the moral order of the day. We will need every last activist...on all sides...this fall.

[ Parent ]
Perplexed (4.00 / 1)
I think that what Obama has done, with the deck stacked against him in many ways, has been truly amazing.  I also agree that in some respects the Clinton campaign has been more guilty of gaming the system.

But I still don't understand how you can argue that the popular vote should be meaningless in the discussion of democratic legitimacy.

At the end of this last post, it almost seems like you're saying "We've come to far, and against odds too long, for us to have an open mind about what a democratic mandate means if this is going to hurt our candidate's chances."

John McCain: Health insurance for low income children represents an "unfunded liability."

[ Parent ]
sheesh (0.00 / 0)
I am asking: how do you measure the popular vote in a primary with caucuses?

The delegate yields from the states themselves are NOT exclusively calculated by the popular vote. Everybody knows this. Delegate counts don't just follow the popular numbers, they reflect them, but don't purely follow them.

That's significant.

I'm pointing out that if you ran a party nomination by popular vote none of the campaigns would have been run at all like they have been.

This is a contest for Pledged Delegates in Congressional Districts for a reason. That refelcts a value of our party.

Will candidates and super delegates look at the popular vote? Sure.

But, let's be real, a ton of that is SPIN. They will calculate it to favor them!

Right now, Clinton is losing on states and on true Pledged Delegates. She is losing Caucuses.

She has two waning spin advantages. The "popular vote" if you include MI and FL and give up on calculating the vote in the caucus states. And delegate counts that grant her huge doses of Super Delegates that may or may not exist for her right now.

Talking about the "popular vote" in the middle of a party nomination won or lost by delegates is a red herring.

I respect the value you are expressing...it's reflected in the delegate awarding process for god's sake...I also don't deny campaigns will use whatever edge to suggest they have a legitimate lead.

But at the convention in Denver, the measure will be Delegates, Pledged and Super.

That's it.

And the Supers should follow the will of the Pledged delegates won according to the rules.

[ Parent ]
Primaries vs Caucuses = Apples vs Oranges (0.00 / 0)
Chris,

I know people have nagged you for "popular vote totals".  But (as you have no doubt been thinking implicitly, given your emphasis on pledged delegate counts), there is no such thing as a popular vote total: how meaningful is it to combine the totals of an open primary with a closed caucus?  It's apples & oranges.

Taking a raw sum unfairly biases open primaries over closed caucuses --- and California has an open primary.  Hence an unfair bias towards Clinton.

Can anybody think of ways to "normalize" for this effect?  E.g. by re-weighting with respect to a state's total (big D) Democratic population?  Or is it more meaningful to re-weight to the total electoral collage of the state, minus 2 (for the bias created by the two senators)?  Any ideas?

Until you've figured out your favored solution to these problems, you're left with these "Apples & Oranges" raw totals.

caucuses (0.00 / 0)
Only 4 caucuses haven't reported actual totals of supporters that show up for each candidate: Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine. News organizations are reporting the state delegate numbers for Alaska, but the Alaska Dems page reports the actual number of supporters for each candidate.

Based on turnout estimates for those 4 caucuses, it is relatively easy to estimate the actual number of supporters that caucused for each candidate. Because of viability issues, this is not quite a perfect count (for example, it almost certainly severely undercounts Edwards support in Nevada), but it is presumably reasonably accurate.

Yes, caucuses are lower turnout than primaries, but any attempt to normalize turnout is such a giant can of worms that I think it doesn't make sense to even contemplate it.

[ Parent ]
Yes: Can Of Worms (0.00 / 0)
Your last sentence summarizes what I'm hinting at: whatever you try and do, this is a can of worms.

I agree with the responder to Kid Oakland: Rules is Rules.  And that includes "floating" unpledged delegates, whether we like it or not.

So it all comes back to Howard Dean: take over your School Boards, take over your local party machinery, just as Chris is doing in Penn,... then get the goddamned unpledged delegates changed if you don't like it!!

Until then, Rules is Rules.

[ Parent ]
Chris (let's pretend it's June 3rd) (0.00 / 0)
Will you leave the Democratic Party if Hillary gets the nod based on a count similar to no. 4, it's June 3, and the majority of superdelegates decided to go with her?
Chris, please see this spreadsheet (0.00 / 0)
I made from FleetAdmiralJ's Feb'5 spreadsheet, where I estimate popular votes for caucus states using available data. The tables run through Feb'5 states (but don't have up-to-date delegate counts from CO etc) and they give me these popular vote estimates for the contested races through super Tuesday: 
7,845,129	7,955,357
Clinton Votes	Obama Votes

My spreadsheet (H/T Fleet)

Please see alo updated: Fleet's spreadsheet.

You can download (using "Export as") both and play with them.

I'll take a look at your and other tabulations and try to update my ss later as needed. Will make a post if needed. Thanks.

Interesting But.... (4.00 / 1)
I don't think in the end it will matter. I also don't think the issues involving Florida/Michigan and superdelegates will matter either. Admittedly, I am an ardent Obama supporter, but I think this campaign will end on March 4th. Superdelegates are not stupid, and they too have a stake in us winning in November, no matter how many chits the Clintons have. In fact, I suspect Obama will start rolling out more and more superdelegate endorsements in the next 3 weeks to create buzz and momentum going into March 4th.

The thing that has disappointed me so far is that people in the media (not surprisingly) and some bloggers continue to perpetuate this meme that Texas is somehow a firewall for Clinton. It's not. The Obama trendline in the IVR Polls shows him surging in the state to within 10 points before February.  This also doesn't even take into account the complex hybrid primary they have there.  People will wake up after Tuesday that Texas, with its caucuses that favor activist, grassroots supporters, and with heavy Obama friendly districts in the primaries, will result in the final knockout blow for Barack.  He may not win the popular vote by much there, but I will go on record right now predicting that he wins more delegates in the state than Clinton.  

Even if Clinton wins in Ohio, the margin won't be that significant. She can carry on to Pennsylvania, but who knows how much her money would dry up by that point.  

'heavy Obama friendly districts in the primaries'? (0.00 / 0)
I would assume that Austin and Dallas/Arlington will go pretty heavily for Obama.  However, I would also assume that most of the rest of the state will go for clinton, considering that the state's democrats are very, very hispanic.  Also, aren't more delegates assigned via the primary than are via the caucus?  I'm pretty sure that's the case.  

This isn't to say that Obama can't win Texas, but to claim that he's surefire in the state isn't really supported by the data, as the demographics really don't favor him.  

[ Parent ]
Today's SUSA numbers (0.00 / 0)
Popular Vote Counts | 31 comments
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