Posted by Jed Lewison on Thu May 29, 2008 at 6:54 PM Pacific
Using Clinton's "popular vote" metric would disenfranchise 27 states
There's certainly some jingoistic appeal to Hillary Clinton's "count every vote" refrain, but the truth is that what she is proposing is a massive power grab, and as in every massive power grab, there are winners and losers.
In this case, it turns out that the losers would be 27 states representing two-fifths of the U.S. population.
Under Clinton's proposal, they would go from having a proportional voice in the nomination process to having a dramatically minimized one, from having 41% of the votes to select the nominee down to having just 24%.
These are state that even Mark Penn would admit matter, among them New York, Washington, Connecticut, Florida, and Michigan.
The flip side is that 22 states would have their power boosted dramatically. And the partisan makeup of these states is surprising: 10 of them actually voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.
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Here's the numbers.
So far, 49 states (including DC) have voted. In these 49 contests, just under 37 million votes have been cast, including estimates for the four caucus states that don't report final vote totals. If there had been no penalties for Michigan and Florida, these 49 contests would have sent 3,463 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
(The delegate numbers in this analysis assume that Clinton would have gotten her way on Michigan and Florida; since the goal here is to assess the impact of her proposals on the process, I accept her assumptions.)
The basic idea behind the analysis is that under both the pledged delegate scenario and the popular vote scenario, each state would supply a certain percentage of the votes used to select the nominee. I calculated that figure for each state, excluding the superdelegates, the states that haven't voted, and the territories.
If a state had a lower percentage of the votes used to select a nominee under Clinton's popular system than the current pledged delegate one, I categorized it as a "loser." That said, here's the numbers for the losers:
- 27 states would lose power under Clinton's system
- These 27 states represent 39% of the U.S. population
- Under the current system, these states select just under 41% of the pledged delegates who will vote at the DNC, roughly equivalent to their population
- Under Clinton's proposed system, these states would only contribute 24% of the votes used to select a nominee, far below their 39% share of the population.
And for the winners:
- 22 states would gain power under Clinton's system
- These 22 states represent 61% of the U.S. population
- Under the current system, these states select just over 59% of the pledged delegates who will vote at the DNC
- Under Clinton's proposed system, these 22 states would contribute 76% of the votes used to select a nominee, giving them disproportionate influence.
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The essential point is that the current system is fair and geographically balanced. You might not be a fan of the way some states select delegates (some people prefer caucuses, other people like open primaries, and still others like closed primaries), but unless we impose a single voting system on the entire country for primaries, then the only thing you can really impact is your own state's mechanisms.
Under Clinton's plan, which is to treat all these mechanisms as if they were identical even though they clearly aren't, there would be a huge power shift from some states to other states, and that shift would give disproportionate power to the winners.
Since our current system is pretty close to perfectly proportional, Clinton's proposal would be an extravagant mistake, resulting in rampant regional favoritism that would undermine the the American union.
The Democratic nominating process is rooted in the Federalist notions that inform our constitution. The benefit is that each state gets to tailor its system to its own needs, but the downside is that since each system is different, you can't add them up together and achieve a meaningful result.
Nonetheless, Clinton continues to pursue this "popular vote" claim regardless of the fact that it violates the principles upon which our democracy was founded. Her argument may sound good, but it's a typically cynical example of ends justifying the means, and the time is long past to put it to rest.
© Jed Lewison