Posted by Jed Lewison on Sun Aug 24, 2008 at 5:36 PM Pacific

The popular vote trope

It's doubly amusing listening to GOP flacks make the disingenuous argument that the nearly 50/50 popular vote split in the Democratic primary is a sign of weakness.

First of all, because of caucuses and a variety of other factors, in the Democratic Party, there really is no such thing as the popular vote -- it's just a clever play on words.

But the funny thing is that even if you were to count up all the votes, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton won a higher percentage of the Democratic primary vote than John McCain did of the Republican primary vote. Even though his chief rival Mitt Romney dropped out of the race just after Super Tuesday, McCain still managed only 46.65% of the GOP primary vote, winning just under 10 million votes -- barely half as much as either Obama or Clinton.

The popular vote trope

It's doubly amusing listening to GOP flacks make the disingenuous argument that the nearly 50/50 popular vote split in the Democratic primary is a sign of weakness.

First of all, because of caucuses and a variety of other factors, in the Democratic Party, there really is no such thing as the popular vote -- it's just a clever play on words.

But the funny thing is that even if you were to count up all the votes, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton won a higher percentage of the Democratic primary vote than John McCain did of the Republican primary vote. Even though his chief rival Mitt Romney dropped out of the race just after Super Tuesday, McCain still managed only 46.65% of the GOP primary vote, winning just under 10 million votes -- barely half as much as either Obama or Clinton.

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