Popular Vote Nonsense…
By But, rather than be content with calling out a math error, Markos has to up the ante audacious to demand we “count the count the Michigan “uncommitted” votes for Obama”. Ah, well, John Edwards was still in the race at the time and was surely in the same boat, having also pulled his name off the ballot in Michigan. At least Markos isn’t calling for Texans that caucused to have their votes counted twice, or that Puerto Rico votes won’t count… yet.
No one but Obama is to blame for his having no votes in Michigan. His campaign came up with the gambit to take his name off the ballot in MI to score cheap points in IA, and his campaign took the lead in convincing Edwards and Richardson to follow along and remove their names from the MI ballot to try and force Clinton to follow suit (my sources are from top people in the Edwards campaign). it didn’t work, Clinton took the hit of the political stunt and kept her name on the ballot in Michigan.
Here’s the thing; however you construct the “popular vote” it certainly has no binding legal force. To the extent it matters at all, it’s a moral argument; the superdelegates, the theory goes, should vote for the candidate who receives the most votes, as the distribution of pledged delegates has anti-democratic elements. Scott has critiqued this argument (pointing out that the structure of the competition affects strategy, and thus that if the candidates had known that the artificial construction called the “popular vote” would be important, they would have campaigned differently) but, frankly, the superdelegates can use whatever measure they want to decide between the candidates. For the reasons Scott suggests, and because there are several different popular vote counts, I think that assessing the race on popular vote is pretty stupid, but whatever.
The point, though is that in making what is essentially a moral rather than a procedural argument, you can’t invoke a procedural decision in order to exclude some substantial number of votes. Note that this isn’t such a problem with the pledged delegate total; the pledged delegate number is procedurally meaningful, and as such the various procedural rules and decisions associated with its tabulation matter. But Jerome here is, essentially, making the moral argument that Clinton should get the nod because she’s more popular, which requires pretending that no one in Detroit, for crying out loud, would prefer Obama to Clinton.
For my own part I continue to think that both the Florida and Michigan contests were shams, and should be treated as such. I don’t really want to revisit that argument, but it’s tangential to this point in any case; when making a moral argument, it’s absurd to resort to procedural shuffling in order to make your case. Another way of putting this is that I can see why people who work for Hillary Clinton would make this case, but just because they’re going to make the case doesn’t mean we have to believe it (note that I’m not claiming Jerome is on the Clinton payroll; I think he’s a bad analyst, but that’s not the same as being bought and paid for).
…Via jdkbrown, fantastic analysis here.