Posted by Jed Lewison on Wed May 28, 2008 at 2:26 PM Pacific

Clinton superdelegate memo gets vote count wrong

From the third paragraph of Hillary Clinton's memo to superdelegates (emphasis added):

"Indeed, since March 1st, she has won over a half million more votes than Senator Obama (difference: + 517,748)."

The problem? The Clinton memo overstates the gap by 36,761 votes -- 8% more than the actual difference.

Now this might not seem like the biggest deal in the world, but consider that 36,761 is bigger than the final margin in 21 different contests (including 17 states). More importantly, it calls into question all the other "key metrics" Clinton cites in her memo.

If she can't get something as simple as this right, why should we trust anything else in the memo? (Especially the Karl Rove-inspired electoral maps.)

This was an easy metric to fact-check. Using RealClearPolitics as a starting point, I got the most recent numbers from the state elections division for each contest, with the exception of Guam (Pacific Daily News), West Virginia (CNN), and Wyoming (the state party). RCP's numbers were almost 100% accurate with the exception of a few hundred votes in Oregon and West Virginia. I added the numbers together, subtracted the difference and presto -- the actual gap was 480,987, not 517,748.

Clinton has every right to argue that she's won the "popular vote," and that superdelegates should overturn the results of primaries and caucuses on that basis. I think her argument is bunk, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have the right to make it. But she's not entitled to her own facts.

As to the substance of the matter, I wouldn't accept her claim about the "popular vote" even if she got the math right. The problem is that there really isn't any such thing as the "national popular vote" in the context of the Democratic nomination process. Every state has different mechanisms for selecting delegates: open vs. closed, primaries vs. caucuses, position in the calendar, who was on the ballot, etc.

Simply totaling up the results without accounting for those differences yields a meaningless statistic. As PocketNines argued many weeks ago, accepting this popular vote argument requires accepting the idea that Missouri, which has an open primary, should be treated as if it were four times as large as Minnesota, which has a caucus -- even though the two states are about the same size overall.

Clearly, such a position is would not be tenable -- unless we want to lose Minnesota in the general election.