The National Popular Vote Myth

Now that Hillary Clinton has won Puerto Rico by a reportedly large margin, her campaign is going claim a popular vote victory. In fact, tomorrow she'll begin airing a new television ad in Montana and South Dakota making exactly that claim.

There's been much dispute about whether or not her claim is true -- did she include this state or exclude that one. That's the wrong way to argue this issue. It's a trap.

The real point is that there is no such thing as the national popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary. Sure, you can add together votes for each candidate in each contest, but that's like saying the Seattle Mariners (21 wins) have already had a better year that the New England Patriots from last year (18 wins).

The most important principle to remember is that the Democratic nomination process empowers each state to choose its own method for selecting delegates to the national convention based on its own needs (subject of course to DNC approval). That's a good thing. Each state is different. State parties should have control over their nomination methods.

The problem is that since each state party adopts its own method, if you add together the results of each contest without taking those differences into account, then some states will have far more power on a per capita basis than other states.

The convention delegate system takes those differences into account. Each state receives a certain number of pledged delegates, based on population. As a result, even if two states with the same population have totally different nomination systems, one state won't get disproportionate influence over the other. For example, if we used simple vote totals, Missouri would have four times as much power as Minnesota, even though they are both the same size.

Obviously, Hillary Clinton's claim to lead the so-called popular vote (however she defines it) is designed to support an argument that she has more legitimacy than Barack Obama. Her argument fails on the merits, though it will no doubt persuade many people who don't realize just how misleading her case is.

This is something that the Obama campaign needs to push back against: it will be the centerpiece of Hillary Clinton's argument, and simply saying that "we choose by delegates" is insuficient. The fact is that Clinton's argument effectively would diminish the power of a majority of states in determinig the nomination.

Far from "evening the playing failed," Hillary Clinton's false popular vote standard would be a huge power grab, designed to give disproportionate power to states where she does well -- at the expense of states where her political opposition does well.