Clinton's enormous victory in West Virginia last night will invariably bring arguments over the "popular vote" in the Democratic nomination campaign back into the discussion. Even before West Virginia, which Clinton won by around 137,500 votes, the Clinton campaign was arguing that it was "in striking distance" of the popular vote lead. In fact, according to counts that do not (fixed) include participants in the delegate selection events in Iowa, Maine, Nevada and Washington, but do include the non-delegate selection events in Florida and Michigan, and also do not include the preferences of the "uncommitted" participants in Michigan, the Clinton campaign is indeed ahead. And so, right on cue, the Clinton campaign is now claiming they lead in the popular vote.
The problem with this popular vote total is that it is a moral argument about the will of the participants in the Democratic nomination campaign, not a legal argument over the definition of the winner of the nomination campaign. Legally, the Democratic nominee is determined by delegates, not by popular vote totals. For a moral argument about the popular vote--a.k.a. the will of the nomination campaign electorate--to carry weight, it needs to be as inclusive as possible in its vote totals. Instead, this vote total pretends that the over 550,000 caucus goers in Washington, Nevada, Maine and Iowa, not to mention the quarter of a million uncommitted voters in Michigan, didn't actually have candidate preferences in the nomination campaign just because those candidate preferences weren't recorded. Excluding those 800,000 participants in the nomination campaign from a popular vote toal, especially when exit polls and turnout numbers make close estimates on those preferences quite simple, renders that popular total pointless. Since popular vote totals are statements of moral value, mass exclusions of this sort drains any popular total of all its moral force.
The popular vote total in the nomination campaign is a moral argument about fairness, intra-party democracy, and legitimacy. It isn't even a moral argument that many people accept, given, among other issues, the variances in voter eligibility from state to state, the various "legitimacy" of the nomination events used in the totals, and the staggered primary calendar itself. Still, as an argument over moral legitimacy to the Democratic presidential nomination, it should not be used lightly and arbitrarily. Certainly, it should not exclude hundreds of thousands of people who tried to participate in the nomination campaign by means of the only event offered to them. When all of the people who attempted to participate in their state's only delegate selection event (or their state's only potential delegate selection event, as is the case in Florida and Michigan) are included, Barack Obama still leads by just under 260,000 votes even after Clinton's 137,500 vote victory in West Virginia. Barring some pretty shocking results in the remaining five contests, Obama will still hold that lead after all the voting is complete on June 3rd.
Of all the remaining arguments the Clinton campaign will probably make over the next three or four weeks, the popular vote argument will disgust me the most. They will claim the moral high ground by supposedly having the most support from participants in the nomination campaign, when in reality such a claim can only be made by ignoring the 800,000 participants in the nomination campaign whose candidate preferences were not recorded (but whose preferences can be closely estimated). Making a moral argument that involves shutting voters out of the process is very disturbing, and gives me bad memories of the Florida recount. Remember, if there was a review of all statewide ballots in Florida, Gore would have won according to any vote counting standard. Excluding voters from popular vote counts, and then claiming legitimacy based on fraudulent counts, does not have a positive track record in America. |
