1. Excluding Michigan and Florida, Obama has a popular vote lead of 610,000 votes.
2. Including FL's beauty-contest result and an exit poll based estimate in MI (which improves it from a non-contest where Obama wasn't on the ballot to sort of a FL-type beauty contest where no one could campaign), Obama currently has a 251,000 lead in the popular vote.
But, then, the popular vote isn't a fair measure in any case. If it were, Obama would have spent all his time in cities (where the votes are) rather than campaigning in Alaska and Idaho. RCP has the announced popular vote from every state that has provided those numbers. Obama leads by this measure by 500,000 votes. RCP also estimates that Obama won the combined contests in Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington by about 110,000 votes. So, excluding Michigan and Florida, Obama has a popular vote lead of 610,000 votes.
It's not really fair to assume that Obama would have only received 35% of the vote in Florida if he had been permitted to campaign there, but for simplicity we'll give Clinton her full measure of votes from the Sunshine State. That leaves her with a deficit of 316,000 popular votes. What can we do about Michigan?
Clinton received 55% of the vote in Michigan and 'uncommitted' received 40%. But according to the exit polls, the people, if given the option, would have voted:
Clinton 46%
Obama 35%
Edwards 12%
There's no perfect solution for counting the popular vote in Michigan, but the exit polls give us something to work with. With 594,000 votes cast, the exit polls project:
Clinton 273,146
Obama 207,900
Edwards 71,280
This gives Clinton another 65,000 votes. So, based on the best available evidence and a fair determination of the rules, Obama currently has a 251,000 lead in the popular vote.
Booman then goes on to estimate that Obama is likely to remain the popular vote leader at the end of all contests even after we factor in FL and MI.
Here is my MI math with relevant links:
MI Exit Poll If these had been the candidates on the ballot today, for whom would you have voted in the Democratic presidential primary?
Category % Total Clinton Dodd Gravel Kucinich Unc.
Hillary Clinton 46 97 - 0 0 3
John Edwards 12 30 2 - 11 57
Dennis Kucinich 2 - - - - -
Barack Obama 35 18 0 1 2 79
Bill Richardson 1 - - - - -
Therefore, it's not a 328K edge for HRC (as in the uncontested result where Obama wasn't on the ballot. Let's ask the Clinton camp exactly how democratic it is to give ZERO, ZILCH, NADA votes to Obama in MI??), but it's 65K (according to the exit poll) if we're going to count MI pop. vote at all.
Apparently, MI Clinton supporters such as Sen. Stabenow and Gov. Granholm etal helped orchestrate the mess in MI and seemingly something similar happened in FL as well. See Sen. Geller mocking the DNC:
Had the leaders in those states (Democratic leaders included) played by the rules and allowed the regularly scheduled primaries to play out, their states would've played a constructively pivotal role in this presidential contest, instead of being turned into divisive wedge factors.
But, even after we include them in the popular vote (at a beauty contest level; Obama would've done much better had the DNC scheduled primaries taken place and Obama had campaigned there), using the best available estimates, we still have Obama leading the popular vote by 250K votes.
