Last night, Hillary Clinton claimed that she had the lead in popular votes in the Democratic primaries:
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.
True ? Well, here’s what the numbers say this morning:
So Hillary’s leading if you include Michigan and Florida and even if you add the caucus state estimates to that right ?
Wrong.
As I’ve noted before, including Hillary Clinton’s 328,309 votes from Michigan and not giving Barack Obama any votes from that state is fundamentally dishonest. If you add to Obama’s total the 238,168 that Uncommitted received in Michigan, then Hillary’s lead disappears (he would lead by 56,645 in the first instance, and 166,867 votes in the second.
And even that compromise ignores the fact that Hillary Clinton was the only candidate on the Michigan ballot and that many Obama supporters, not to mention supporters of John Edwards and other candidates still in the race on January 15th, most likely stayed home because they had nobody to vote for and had been told their votes wouldn’t count.
But that’s only the most obvious part of the dishonesty of Clinton’s Popular Vote argument, as ABC’s Jake Tapper points out:
The Iowa Democratic Party reported that 236,000 voters turned out for the Iowa caucuses on January 3. So why does the Associated Press tally only record 1,677 votes?
(…)
The bottom line: Sen. Barack Obama likely won the popular vote as well — even with those disputed contests in Michigan and Florida counting.
The analysis that Tapper relies on says this:
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.
That is basically in line with the estimates at RealClearPolitics noted above, and it makes clear that Hillary Clinton’s claim that she has the votes of more people than Barack Obama depends on what the meaning of “more” is.
