So now will Obama win the nomination unfairly: popular vs. delegate votes?

I'm so sick of this.

n/t

So are we, so why dont you stop?

OR...I don't get what your post means. Care to elaborate?

I'm serious. That's how it's been working. Russert is this moment saying it's the delegates, so she's toast, I think.

You have to throw out caucuses entirely if you count the popular vote.

I'll double that THERE IS NO POPULAR VOTE IN A PRIMARY PROCESS

He just said that the Democratic Party doesn't have a clear process of selecting a nominee. Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't there rules put in place before January 1, 2008?

Allow me to commend you on your semantic acuity.

so you're either confused or dishonest.

I don't get this argument.

And that's the bullshit end of their argument.

That seems fair.

LOL

I am sick of the fools who still follow Clinton no matter how many times she changes her story.

democraticaly?

the count is performed and the smaller groups (the ones that don't meet the criteria - 15% of the total, I think) negotiate with one another or with one of the larger groups that DO meet the criteria until the groups re-form and the count is taken again, and the process repeats itself until whatever groups are left meet the criteria and then the delegates are apportioned to the candidates those groups represent. I like it because individuals talk to one another and to small groups about the issues and that's how each person in one of smaller groups picks which one of the bigger groups s/he is going to join before each re-count. It's much more about issues and what joining a given candidate's group makes possible in terms of political action on the issues based on the candidate's policies.

saying that the Democratic nomination is decided by delegates. All the candidates knew those rules before a single vote was cast and the caucus states make it impossible to count the popular vote.

Obama has the money, and is registering young voters in record numbers

So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.

:shrug:

Unlike 2000 and 2004 voter registration is crucial.

Democrats have lit the fire under everyones ass.

Each state chooses whether it will use a caucus, a primary, or some combo of those two to select ITS delegates to the national convention.

The popular vote is only useful for looking at the states in which the popular vote is used to pick delegates.

The delegate total is what matters. If you win a primary state, you get delegates which relate to that win of popular votes.

It's not a complicate process. Anyone who can count and read and understand it.

That is delegates.

PERIOD.

Caucus states don't count "votes" so you cannot use that metric in your equation.

STOP LYING AND SUCK IT UP. SHE LOST. THE END. GAME OVER.

Hillay does not lead in the popular vote. Unless you count Michigan, where Obama was not even on the friggin ballot. It is a supreme irony that those who want every vote counted would endorse a vote with the same format as the Russian system where there is only one candidate on the ballot.

Hillary agreed to the rules before the contest began. Why does she now want to break the rules she totally agreed with? Oh...political expediency. That is the Clinton way, I guess. Sorry, didn't work this time....

That's it.


That's the ONLY metric.


Clinton surrogates spent the entire month of December hammering this point home on all of the cable networks. Only NOW, when the metric doesn't work for them, do they want to find another metric that does.


There is no such thing as an accurate popular vote count when more than 1/3 of the contests are caucuses that make no accounting for how many people showed up to caucus.


Read it again until it sinks in:

In football, there is one metric for determining the winner. Points. Not yards, turnovers, or cutest cheerleaders. Points.

In baseball, there is one metric for determining the winner. Runs. Not hits, errors, or best hot dogs.

In hockey, there is one metric for determining the winner. Goals. Not shots on goal, saves, or who won the most bench-clearing brawls.

And in the Democratic nomination race, there is one metric for determining the winner. Delegates. Not popular vote (which can't be measured accurately anyway), not which states were won, not who has spent the most time in Washington.


Get that through your thick heads, Hillbots. There's only one metric for keeping score. Total delegates. Obama has won the pledged delegates, and is winning the superdelegates (and will likely continue to widen that margin).

If you count the actual number of people who voted in caucus states, which she doesn't, then she isn't anywhere near ahead in the popular vote.

Per ABC's website:

"Here’s the deal: ABC and other news organizations are basing their totals on counts supplied by The Associated Press. Those numbers have Obama ahead (by 579,502 votes) if you leave out Michigan, where he wasn't on the ballot, and Florida, where neither candidate campaigned, in both cases to respect the national party in a dispute over those states' primary dates. Clinton's claim is that if you add in the votes from those two states, she's ahead – and she is, by a grand total of 43,579 votes out of more than 33 million cast.

"In fact," Clinton told Gibson, "I'm slightly ahead in the national vote right now."

Hold it.

Above and beyond the Michigan/Florida issue are the challenges in counting votes in the Iowa, Nevada, Maine, Washington and Texas caucuses. There the AP counted initial delegates, not votes, simply because votes weren't tabulated. ("Initial" delegates because final delegate selection is a more drawn-out process. Don’t ask.) It makes sense if what you’re really after is a delegate count. But if the vote count is what you care about – as Clinton clearly does – well, it doesn't.

Take Iowa. The AP count there gives Obama 940 votes, Clinton 737. That seems bizarre in a state where the state Democratic Party reports that 236,000 caucus-goers turned out. Caucuses are party-run affairs; they make their own rules, and vote-counting wasn't on the agenda. AP had no choice. Its "vote" count tallies initial delegates, because that's all it had to tally.

But there is a way to estimate actual voters – an estimate to be sure, but an entirely plausible one. In Iowa we can multiply total caucus-goers by the candidate preferences measured in the entrance poll – 34 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Clinton. That produces a vote estimate of 80,240 votes for Obama, 63,720 for Clinton – an Obama margin of 16,520 votes, rather than the 196-"vote" margin in the delegate-based count.

Doing the same in Nevada helps Clinton, giving her an 8,229-vote margin, rather than her 582-delegate margin in the AP delegate count.

In Maine we don't have an entrance poll, but we do have delegate percentages – 60 percent of initial delegates went to Obama, 40 percent to Clinton. Applying those shares to the state party's count of 44,866 caucus-goers produces an 8,773-vote Obama margin, compared to his 683-delegate margin.

Washington's a tougher nut. The AP count based on initial delegates is 21,629 for Obama, 9,992 for Clinton – a 68-31 percent Obama margin. But we can’t use that margin to produce a vote estimate, because unlike in Iowa, Nevada and Maine, the state party in Washington didn't produce an overall turnout figure for its caucuses.

However there was another event – a "beauty contest" primary in Washington, held in addition to its caucuses. The primary did not elect delegates, so it's not included in most tallies. But it does represent people who got up on their hind legs and voted – 354,112 for Obama, 315,744 for Clinton – an Obama margin of 38,368 votes. This seems more than fair to Clinton, since Obama won delegates by a much wider margin – but with no total caucus-goer count, it's the only vote-based data we've got.

Texas is the big kahuna, with its own complications. There was both a primary and a caucus there, and both awarded delegates. The initial delegate count for the Texas caucuses has 23,918 for Obama and 18,620 for Clinton. This is complicated by the fact that only 41 percent of the caucus precincts were included in the AP count, but again it's what we've got. That's 56-44 percent for Obama.

How many people attended Texas caucuses? The state party tells us it was “a little under a million.” That's an awfully round number, and some anecdotal reporting suggests the Texas caucuses weren't, shall we say, supremely well-organized. Let’s call it 900,000. That produces a margin for Obama of 108,000 votes.

We can debate whether it's fair to include both the Texas primary and caucus results, since that double-counts people who participated in both. But people who voted in both Texas events were playing by the rules, and including them seems at least as fair as including Michigan, where Obama voluntarily stayed off the ballot, thus netting exactly zero votes to Clinton's 328,309. (Pushing it a bit, one could argue to give Obama all or some of the "undeclared" vote in Michigan, 40 percent or 238,168 voters, including disproportionate numbers of supporters that elsewhere have been strong for him – including young voters, African-Americans, independents and better-educated whites.)

We're leaving aside one other state, Nebraska – it had a caucus for which we do have a vote count. It also had a beauty-contest primary. But since the primary didn’t award delegates, and the caucus votes were counted, it doesn’t quite fit the mold. If we did count its beauty contest, though, it'd produce another 2,665 votes for Obama – not enough to change our basic conclusion.

And that conclusion? Using these estimates of actual voters in the Iowa, Nevada, Maine, Washington and Texas caucuses, rather than the initial delegate counts, we get a net total Democratic vote to date of 17,607,152 for Obama and 17,504,742 for Clinton, an Obama lead of 102,410 votes – even with Michigan and Florida included.

The national vote count, of course, has nothing to do with winning the Democratic nomination under party rules - that's done by delegate counts. Clinton nonetheless has found her claim of an advantage in total vote a useful talking point. The problem: It doesn't quite add up. "

Link:

If you were sick of that maybe you should ask yourself if the positions were reversed if you'd still be sick.

Delegates. It was the standard from the beginning. Had the standard been popular vote, or some other measure, (like winning all the states with the word "new" in their names), the campaigns would have been run differently. This is why one critical standard of truly fair and democratic elections is to have a single prior established measurement to determine the winner that cannot be changed along the way. There are no "two measurements" (pick the measurement you like) fair elections. This is simply true by definition.

OK, now that you've found out about the use of delegates (presumably you now know about conventions, too), and the differences between caucuses and primaries, you should google something called the "electoral college." You'll be hearing more about that in the fall--get your outrage ready, a voter in Wyoming is hugely overrepresented compared to one in one of the big states!