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Quote of the Day: Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter On Clinton’s Popular Vote Argument (UPDATED)

Posted by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief in Politics.
May 22nd, 2008 | Comments

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter takes a detailed look at Senator Hillary Clinton’s argument that she is head in the popular vote in detail and the counter arguments and and concludes:

With a big win in Puerto Rico, Clinton could possibly erase that margin (plus several thousand more that Obama is expected to net in Montana and South Dakota). She could then proclaim that with the help of Puerto Rican voters who cannot vote in a general election, she is the popular vote winner.

The shorthand many Clinton supporters are already taking into the summer is that she won the popular vote but had the nomination “taken away” (as Joy Behar said on “The View”) by a man.

What a helpful message for uniting the Democratic Party.

If the Obama people have any sense, they will demand in their negotiations with the Clintonites that Hillary cease and desist in her specious claim to have won the most popular votes.

Given that more than 35 million voters took part in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, the math games on both sides look awfully silly. Everyone should agree to call it a tie.

Alter is correct. More and more this is looking like 1968, and a year where some Democrats are determined to yank defeat from the jaws of victory. Clinton’s argument now is that unless she gets her way in Michigan and Florida whoever gets it (unless it is her, that is) will get a nomination that really is not legitimate. It’s saying Do it my way or I’ll split the party without actually saying those words. Will the Democratic party apparatus and superdelegates agree to that approach?

UPDATE: Josh Marshall echoes my view expressed above:

What she’s doing is not securing her the nomination. Rather, she’s gunning up a lot of her supporters to believe that the nomination was stolen from her — a belief many won’t soon abandon. And that on the basis of rationales and arguments there’s every reason to think she doesn’t even believe in.

UPDATE II: Steve Benen had defended Clinton but now has had enough. Read his ENTIRE post but here is a sampling (these are excerpts only):

By last night, Clinton had made my defense of her efforts look rather foolish. In fact, looking back, I’ve defended Clinton, more than once, when people said she was putting her own interests above those of the party and the nation. But after seeing her tactics yesterday, I’m done defending Hillary Clinton.

….For several weeks, I’ve appreciated the fact that Clinton considers herself the superior candidate, and has kept her campaign going in the hopes, from her perspective, of saving the party from itself. But after yesterday, it’s become impossible for me to consider Clinton’s intentions honorable. Her conduct is not that of a leader.

What’s so striking is the shamelessness of her reversal(s). When Florida and Michigan broke party rules and were punished by the DNC, Clinton not only supported the decision, she honored it and spoke publicly about those votes not counting. One of her own top strategists was responsible for making the decision in the first place. Now, Clinton is saying, “Never mind what I said and did before.

AND:

Instead of trying to help bring the party together — Election Day is 24 weeks away — Clinton went to Florida to argue that if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, his nomination will be illegitimate. And if the DNC plays by the rules Clinton used to support, it’s guilty of vote-suppression — comparable to slavery, Jim Crow, and Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe….Many Dems have been waiting for a soft landing, a graceful exit, a classy wrap-up. Clinton, for reasons that I want desperately to understand, has chosen to abandon these norms and instead choose a destructive, divisive path. She’s playing a dangerous game in which the only winner is the Republican Party.

Read it in its entirety.
In other words: Clinton had already lost many of the progressive mainstream journalists and bloggers. She had split the centrists, moderates and independents. Now she’s losing more centrists, moderates and independents NOT because of her policy stances (which centrists, moderates and independents may favor more than they favor Obama’s) but because of her tactics.

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ChrisWWW

The money quote from Steve Benen:
"Clinton is attacking Democrats for playing by party rules. Worse, she supported those rules until it became self-serving to do otherwise. And now she’s characterizing anyone who disagrees with her as being an opponent of democracy."

It's as simple as that.

Obama and his supporters need to do what they can to force her out as soon as possible.

pacatrue

Another issue is that using "the popular vote" inherently devalues the elections in caucus states. Take my state Hawaii where about 35,000 people participated in the caucus, and Obama carried about 70% to Clinton 30%. That comes out to 10,500 votes for Clinton and 19,500 for Obama. So we just add this to the national popular vote tally, right?

Wrong.

Because a 9,000 vote difference is by no means a legitimate measure of the difference in levels of support among Democrats in the state. Caucuses are for choosing delegates, not sampling the popular vote. The 70/30 percentage split is likely much more accurate, so, if there had been a primary, which there wasn't, instead of a caucus, perhaps 100,000 would have voted instead of 35,000. This would bring the tallies to 70,000 votes for Obama and 30,000 votes for Clinton, a 40,000 vote margin.

Of course, if there had been a primary, the percentages might have been different. Maybe Obama at 65% or 60% or 72%. We don't know. And that's the point. This popular vote theory only works by devaluing the votes of party members in states with caucuses. Since Clinton is extremely concerned about counting all votes, she surely would not let this happen.

ChrisWWW

pacatrue,
You're right. That's what makes this entire popular vote argument beyond silly. It'd be funny if the stakes weren't so high.

Mike_P

The time has come for a lot of us, certainly me, to follow the lead of a host of former pro-Bush bloggers, supporters and defenders who, when faced with the obvious were able to accept the truth and admit publicly they were wrong, and that the hated "anti-war left" had been right about so much of Bush's incompetance. Andrew Sullivan, John Cole and a few others looked into the abyss and didn't like what they saw. While Sullivan never let go of his intense dislike of the Clintons, Cole tried to repeatedly on his "Balloon Juice" blog. But not any more.

I'm joining them in that I have to accept, based on the truth laid bare, that some of what the right said of the Clintons in the 90s was a lot more accurate than I was anywhere near willing to accept. Not the silly "troopergate" crap, or the Vince Foster "murder," but the power-at-any-cost meme that was the driving force behind so many of the silly made up "scandals," as well as the legitimate ones.

I'd like to excuse the Clintons by blaming those attacks for "teaching" them how politics is played. But that would just be making more excuses for them, a continuation of letting them off the hook for their own bad acts. There are no excuses left, and I refuse to be an enabler for them any longer by defending them the way I once did.

pacatrue

For curiosity, I quickly averaged the percentage of the vote that Clinton and Obama took, as this is the only quickly available measure that values voters in primary states and caucus states equally. This looks even worse for Clinton than the delegate tally, as Obama comes out with a mean percent of 54% and Clinton 42%. If you add in Michigan and Florida completely unaltered (so that Obama gets 0% of Michigan, a clearly accurate number) things only shift to 53/42.5 respectively.

Of course, a straight average gives as much weight to the Virgin Islands as it does to California, so you now have to weight the percentages, but by what? The number of Democratic voters in the state? The number of voters? The state's population? None of these are good because some states allow only Democrats, some allow anyone. No way to make it consistent. The best thing I can come up with is to weight by the number of delegates available in the state but that's getting really close to the already existing system of choosing delegates.

We are left with two possibilities. 1) Devalue caucus voters who, through no fault of their own, are not sampled fairly with respect to popular vote or 2) make up some criteria that's easily as controversial as anything we already have in FL or MI.

DLS

Mike P.: The incompetence (and some genuine misconduct) was noticed by many prior to the 1996 elections. Expression of the reaction to it continues this November.

* * *

Much as the more -- febrile -- Obama fans may dislike it, the race isn't over, and the convention is the logical place to see this race resolved; it should be resolved then and there. The convention is Clinton's "follow-through terminus" as well as where Michigan and Florida will have their outlaw-election-and-delegates issue finally resolved.

Newt

The DNC needs to resolve the election problems we face due to the caucus/popular vote nomination process, potential election fraud in states without easily audited paper ballots, and the current and future effect of Republican-led state legislatures disrupting the Democratic primaries by changing their states’ primary dates.

This FL & MI mess is a great opportunity to tackle all three of the above problems. If we re-vote by mail in MI & FL in June or July, we automatically bring both states back into compliance with DNC rules on timing of elections. This prevents any future Republican attempts to disrupt the Dem nomination process by moving up the primary dates. A precedent would be established requiring states not in compliance to utilize a future mail-in process. It also helps prevent election fraud because paper ballots are physically available for recounts or audits. Finally, it would create a route for Hillary to establish that she really is more electable without Obama’s side claiming she manipulated the party pledged or Superdelegates.

The DNC should coordinate the mail-in for FL and MI based on Oregon’s successful 100% mail-in model. We have enough money to pay for these two states if we utilize equipment we already have, especially since it’s much cheaper to do a mail-in than try to repeat the vote through the two states’ election process.

This is the DNC’s chance to enfranchising voters in MI and FL while mitigating the problems caused by those states’ Republican-led legislatures.

Newt

For caucus only states, you should take the percentage each candidate earned in the caucus and apply that to the total number of registered Democrats.

Obama gets 70% of Hawaii's registered Democrats added to the so called "popular vote" and Hillary gets 30%.

pacatrue

I agree with you, Newt, that that is probably the best measure of Democratic opinion that you could get at this point, but it still isn't fair to all. That's because various states allowed Dems only; some allowed Dems only, but people were allowed to register at the voting site; and others have open primaries/caucuses. So which is the correct representation of that state?

One possibility is to ignore these differences and weight everything by Democratic members, which is sort of what you are proposing, but surely the vote percentages that you are weighting would be very different if only Dems could vote. The other choice would be to weight by the groups that were allowed to vote. If it was an open primary/caucus, you weight by everyone; if it was a closed primary/caucus, you weight just by Dems -- but then again, you've just counted voters in open races as potentially twice as important as voters in closed races. And then what do you do with crazy Texas who had both a caucus and a primary? Average the results of the two, after you average the caucus measure?

Surely people could come up with some system to measure the "popular vote" but again the measure would at least be as controversial as the delegate system, so why not use the delegate system in the first place? That's what the candidates all agreed to.

After this election is done, I would be very open to changing the Democratic primary system -- get rid of super delegates, perhaps get rid of caucuses -- but you can't do it in the middle of the race. The result would be even worse than now. The DNC rules committee would effectively choose the nominee by themselves.

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