May 5, 2008
Psuedo-Super Tuesday…Four?
New Hampshire, California, Texas and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and now North Carolina and Indiana. That is the list of contests that have been “must-wins” for the Clinton campaign, and the final states on that list will vote tomorrow. If she loses North Carolina and wins Indiana, the race might go on, but Clinton’s chances will hinge entirely on counting Florida and Michigan’s primaries, despite many believing them to be tainted. If she loses Indiana, she’s out of the race. As Clinton surrogate James Carville says, “If she wins North Carolina, she’s the nominee.” As usual before a pivotal contest, The Muse will explore possible outcomes, listed from least likely to most likely, and what effect they’ll have on the contest.
5) Clinton wins North Carolina, wins Indiana by 12% or more – The likely result of this is a bloody nomination contest that is decided at the convention. In this scenario, both Obama and Clinton will finish the nomination process claiming to be ahead in the popular vote (because there are many ways of counting it), with Clinton likely ahead in superdelegates and Obama ahead in the popular vote. This result likely guarantees Obama and Clinton on the same ticket, as otherwise the party will be hopelessly destroyed. John McCain would have a chance to win 40 states in this situation.
3) Obama wins Indiana (or loses it by less than 5), wins North Carolina by double digits – In this case, the nomination is over, and a large bloc of superdelegates will likely switch to Obama. If this occurs, by the end of Wednesday Obama will probably lead by over 200 delegates and lead among superdelegates, likely forcing Clinton’s hand to rescind her candidacy.
2) Clinton wins Indiana by more than 10, Obama wins North Carolina by less than five – This is the trickiest outcome to analyze, because it would place momentum clearly in Clinton’s favor, yet Obama would still be almost certain to win the most delegates and popular votes. This would likely be a scenario where Clinton would try to get the bylaws committee to count Michigan and Florida’s results, and the nomination would likely be decided on the floor of the credentials committee. The most important contingency in this scenario is that Clinton gets a significant margin in popular votes. Right now, she trails by 117,000 votes in the only popular vote count that she has a chance of winning – the popular vote counting Michigan and Florida, while not counting the caucus states that didn’t report vote totals. Counting the caucus states, she trails by an insurmountable amount in that count, and 15 of the other 16 ways of counting the votes*, but if she wins this variant of the popular vote, she’ll at least have a case to be made that she has won the popular vote.
1) Obama wins North Carolina by as much or more than Clinton wins Indiana – In terms of total votes, if Obama leaves the day with a net positive in votes and delegates, Clinton is probably finished. This means that if Clinton wins Indiana by 8, Obama must win North Carolina by 6, if Clinton wins Indiana by 10, Obama must win North Carolina by 7.5 if he wants to drive Clinton’s chances of the nomination down to five percent or so.
*Popular Vote?
One of the most confusing parts of this campaign is how the popular vote is tabulated. Because it is meaningless in the Democratic nominating process (and the general election for that matter) the importance of the popular vote is how it sways superdelegates. Below are all the different part of counting the popular vote.
The basic and least controversial popular vote, which is the base that all other popular votes add on to, is the total number of popular votes in DNC sanctioned contests. This excludes Florida and Michigan (because they were stripped of their delegates), as well as Iowa, Washington, Nevada, and Maine (because they didn’t report raw vote totals, just their delegate equivalents). In this number, Obama has 14.4 million votes to Clinton’s 13.9 million votes.
One of the frequently added totals to the popular vote number is the estimated results from the caucuses in Iowa, Maine, Washington, and Nevada. In estimates by realclearpolitics, the inclusion of these states raises Obama’s vote lead over Clinton by 110,000 votes, as he won three of those four states.
A more controversial addition to the popular vote is Florida. Clinton supporters argue that because all candidates’ names were on the ballot, it was a fair race. Obama supporters argue that since nobody was permitted by the DNC to campaign in Florida it wasn’t truly an election, more of a poll of name recognition. They also note that many voters, especially minority and youth voters among whom Obama has done well, likely stayed home instead of voting because they knew the primary wouldn’t count. As is, counting the Florida primary diminishes Obama’s margin over Clinton by 295,000 votes, meaning DNC sanctioned+florida yields a 207,000 vote lead for Obama and DNC sanctioned+florida+4 caucuses yields a 317,000 vote lead for Obama.
Probably the most controversial aspect of the popular vote is whether or not Michigan should be counted. Due to its breach of party rules, Michigan was stripped of all its delegates and candidates were barred from campaigning in the state. Clinton was the only major candidate whose name was on the ballot, and 40% of voters voted for “uncommitted,” while another half a million voters didn’t vote because they knew the primary couldn’t count. Clinton supporters have counted the state’s result as 328,309 votes to zero, while the generally accepted result for those who include it is to give all the “uncommitted” votes to Obama since those were people who went to the polls just so they could vote against Clinton. When the uncommitted votes are factored in, Clinton’s margin in the state drops to about 90,000 votes.
Another set of contests that that many will can’t and many won’t count are the primaries in America’s territories. Many superdelegates don’t believe Guam, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Democrats Abroad, and Puerto Rico should be counted as they have no bearing on the November election. Currently, this count is rather meaningless; 9300 votes or so taken from Obama’s margin is not going to tip the scales one way or another (it would account for about 0.03% of all votes cast thus far), so the main discussion will be whether or not to include Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has a history of high voter turnout, with some projections expecting as many as two million votes to be cast in the territory. If Clinton wins by a large margin, say 15%, she would be able to say she won the popular vote 4 different ways instead of 2. Many superdelegates might have a problem with awarding the nomination based on a territory.
The final modifier when considering the popular vote is whether or not the state had a primary or a caucus, and whether it had an open or closed primary. States with caucuses typically have much smaller voter turnout, and therefore much smaller popular vote margins for winners who might have equal support to candidates who get bigger margins in similarly sized primary states. This would normally be cancelled out if it weren’t a primary race where one candidate (Obama) won 90% of the caucus states, and won them by huge margins. There are two sides to the caucus story. The Obama campaign’s side is that if these states were primaries instead of caucuses, Obama would have a far better popular vote showing. If Minnesota were a primary, for instance, Obama would have won the state by 120,000 more votes. The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, believes that caucuses are undemocratic, and that if the caucuses were primaries Obama wouldn’t have won most of them by such lopsided margins. The second half of the equation is whether to count open and closed primaries the same. Some would argue that open primaries, those in which independents and Republicans can vote, are more demonstrative of a candidate’s electability in the general election, while others believe that open primaries are open to Republican saboteurs and that even non-saboteur Republicans don’t have the same interests in mind as Democrats do.
Overall, it’s one big mess, and you can probably derive about 50 different methods of counting the votes. One thing is for sure, both candidates are ahead.
History will show that our inaction (impeachment) is tolerance of the hijacking of our Bill of Rights by the current administration.