As Kentucky and Oregon head to the polls today, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are set to claim that they’ve achieved a milestone.
First, by tonight, it’s expected that Barack Obama will have a majority of all the pledged delegates at stake this primary season:
Senator Barack Obama is poised to reach a milestone in the presidential race on Tuesday by capturing a majority of pledged delegates, but he said he would not declare victory against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton or suggest the Democratic primary should end until the final three contests are finished on June 3.
For Mr. Obama, the situation is delicate. While eager to proceed to a general election match with Senator John McCain of Arizona, the likely Republican nominee, Mr. Obama is also trying to bring the contest to a close in a way that allows him to win over Mrs. Clinton’s supporters and unify the party.
The results from the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on Tuesday will almost certainly allow Mr. Obama to reach a threshold that his campaign has long sought to establish as the critical measure of the will of the party: winning a majority of the delegates awarded in primaries and caucuses. He also continues to gather support from the party leaders known as superdelegates that he still needs to secure the nomination, picking up five more endorsements on Monday.
Mr. Obama does not want to appear as if he is pushing Mrs. Clinton out of the race, preferring instead to treat her gracefully as a worthy Democratic fighter, not as a stubborn nemesis.
He issued a directive to his campaign not to overtly declare victory at a rally on Tuesday in Iowa, a sentiment he telegraphed in Montana on Monday where he appealed for support in the state’s June 3 primary.
“We still have a number of contests, including Montana, before we’re able to secure the nomination,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to an audience in Billings. “Senator Clinton has run a magnificent race, and she is still working hard, as am I, for all of these last primary contests.”
Politically, it’s smart for Obama not to appears as if he’s pushing Clinton out of the race, even though she effectively is, but it’s a strategy that’s also encouraging Hillary to engage in some fantasizing of her own:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is entering the Kentucky and Oregon primaries on Tuesday with one of the most pugnacious political messages of her campaign: That she is ahead in the national popular vote when all votes are counted, including from the unsanctioned primaries in Michigan and Florida, and that party leaders who have a vote as super-delegates should reflect this level of appeal.
This argument is of a piece with Mrs. Clinton’s increasingly populist image, as a fighter on behalf of average people, but it is also a debatable claim: Most tallies of the national popular vote put Mr. Obama in the lead, especially when Michigan and Florida are not counted.
As I’ve noted several times myself (here, here, here, and here) Hillary Clinton’s popular vote argument is simply intellectually dishonest.
Here’s what I mean:
Clinton seems to be in the lead in one category — if you include Michigan and Florida, the state’s that broke the DNC’s rules and which every candidate agreed would not count because of the DNC’s sanctions for doing so — but even that’s dishonest because it allocates exactly zero votes from Michigan for Obama despite the fact that over 200,000 people voted against Hillary in that state’s January 15th Primary. If you give those uncommitted votes to Obama, then his 26,000 vote deficit becomes a 211,000 vote advantage.
Furthermore, as Brendan Loy notes, Hillary’s math is further intellectually dishonest in that she doesn’t even count all the votes:
People, this math isn’t just fuzzy, it’s is completely indefensible, and it’s an absolute joke that nobody is calling her on it. Everyone talks about Florida and Michigan, but nobody talks about Iowa, Nevada, Washington and Maine. Yet their exclusion from the popular-vote tally isn’t even arguably plausible, and it goes completely against everything Clinton is pretending to stand for in the Michigan and Florida debate. “Count every vote!” Honor the “will of the people!” Unless those people happen to live in Iowa, Nevada, Washington or Maine!
Brendan is right, of course. Claiming that you want to “count all the votes” while excluding the overwhelming support that Obama received in Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine. As noted above, if you include those votes (but not the Michigan uncommitted), Obama has an 83,000 vote lead. If you include the caucus states and the Michigan uncommitted in Obama’s total, he has a 321,423 vote majority.
So, even if you accept the argument that the popular vote should somehow trump the delegate count, then, Hillary Clinton is still in second place and her arguments otherwise are deceitful, dishonest, and, well, Clintonian.
