I live in one of those weird time warps where I get to hear about Meet the Press hours before I get to watch it on my local affiliate, but if what Halperin says is correct, this strikes me as pretty significant:
Clinton campaign chair McAuliffe, who some consider the greatest chairman in the history of the Democratic Party, said the race isn’t over and laid out Clinton’s path to the nomination (”Anything can happen.”), including predicting Clinton would win the popular vote. He said he would accept an agreement in which Florida and Michigan got half their delegates seated at the convention, based on the primary results. Said Clinton would continue through the end of the primaries, and looked towards the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.In terms of the delegate math, this proposal is essentially identical to the one advanced by Michigan's party leadership, which would split that state's delegates 69:59. Allocating results based on the primary instead, but cutting the numbers in half (and giving Obama credit for all of Michigan's uncommitted delegates) would make things 36.5:27.5. The former nets Clinton a 10-delegate advantage and the latter a 9-delegate advantage.
There's inevitably some angle I'm missing here, but I don't see why the Clinton campaign would filibuster a plan that would get them a 10-delegate swing in Michigan but be amenable to one that would get them a 9-delegate swing. Perhaps they think doing things this way would tend to legitimate the popular vote in Florida and Michigan, but acknowledging that Florida and Michigan's delegates should be halved would seem also to acknowledge that the popular votes cannot quite be taken at face value. Since there is no such thing as an official popular vote count, perhaps some news organizations would wind up halving the popular votes in Florida and Michigan too. That would put Clinton about 535,000 votes behind. If I make ridiculously optimistic assumptions for Clinton I have her netting 120,000 votes in West Virginia, 135,000 in Kentucky, 270,000 in Puerto Rico, losing 25,000 in Oregon, and splitting the other two states. That works out to 500,000 votes, still not enough to win her any of the more credible versions of the popular vote count, nor a version that counted Florida and Michigan as half votes.
As I said, there must be something I'm missing. Perhaps their angle is that they'll attempt to characterize Michigan's uncommitted delegates as in fact being uncommitted rather than Obama delegates, even though those ghostie delegates have in fact become actual human beings, and all or almost all of them have in fact committed to Obama. (If they accepted Michigan's plan, those delegates would be officially and unambiguously assigned to Obama). Perhaps McAuliffe spoke out of turn. There's always been the sense that he's not quite as willing as someone like Harold Ickes or Lanny Davis to go completely down with the ship.
But the Obama campaign should seriously consider taking the halvsies deal, which will certainly allow them to clinch a plurality of pledged delegates on May 20th, and quite probably an outright majority -- see Scenario H in the table below.
24 comments
Watching it now. It came out of Russert forcing him to confront what he said in his book about Michigan in '04. His response to the "Would you accept 50%" question was... "We certainly might." Hardly definitive.
In the Michigan case, they have mentioned before that Obama would get 0 because "uncommitted" does not equal Obama.
So perhaps they are arguing they should get 36.5 while the rest are unpledged, instead of giving Obama definite delegates?
Your assumption presumes that the Clinton camp would let Obama have the uncommitted votes...I'm almost certain they would not.
I still say counting Michigan and Florida in any way is untenable.
The Clinton campaign certainly seems to have failed to note that the people elected to fill the uncommitted delegate slots are real people with real positions and almost none are uncommitted at this stage.
I also find it odd that while Clinton in her 5/6 "victory" speech said that there are 50 states in the union would insist that the popular vote that be counted include non-states
Since the RBC seems inclined to implement option E, or something functionally equivalent, why would the Obama campaign join with the Clinton campaign in asking for something like H? The RBC's word will be the last word, because the superdelegates have no stomach for a credentials battle. There's no need for Obama's campaign to concede anything regarding MI and FL.
Poblano,
If the Clinton camp continues to obsess on the popular vote, I'd be very curious to see a real analysis of what the popular vote might have been in caucus states if they had held primaries. In Idaho, for example, Obama had a HUGE caucus win; in a primary, he would have won a smaller percentage and netted fewer delegates, but his popular vote advantage would have been MUCH greater.
Yeah Poblano, he spoke out of both sides of his mouth. He said we certainly (and then he slipped in the word "might" very quietly) so if you werent listening closely it sounded like he said that they would certainly accept 50% of the delegates. They wont accept this at all. In fact I dont think they want a deal done at all since the uncertainty of the FL/MI situation is the only thing they keep harping on. When FL/MI is resolved and Obama is still ahead what else are they going to use to justify their staying in the race?
When the Clinton Camp says "the Michigan and Florida situation still needs to be resolved" it's code for "resolved to our satisfaction", which is nothing less than both counting fully, and Michigan's popular vote being counted 330,000-0 in her favor.
Which of course is a total nonstarter.
Hillary plans on making up hundreds of thousands of votes in Puerto Rico and passing Obama in the popular vote their. A statehood referendum will be on the same ballot, ensuring a high turnout. I am worried about vote fraud in Puerto Rico. The ballots are counted by hand. And there is a long history of fraud. The post above about HRC's victory speech after Indiana is correct. Hillary went out of her way to mention the popular vote of non-states. Also, Bill Clinton has been traveling to Puerto Rico several times recently.
There are 2.4 million registered voters, and 1.99 million voted in 2004. The projected turnout by has been grossly underestimated for Puerto Rico's first U.S. Presidential Primary. Clinton's backers there succeeded in getting Puerto Rico to switch from a caucus to a primary, and they are also succeeded in getting a statehood referendum on the ballot, which is a huge issue there. If 2 million votes are case, and HRC gets 60%, she could make up 400,000 popular votes. On her conference call with supporters yesterday, she assured them she would win the popular vote
New Rasmussen polls for NC, VA, and MI (some not even released yet)-
http://www.hedgehogreport.com/?p=8105
In Salon, columnist Walter Shapiro describes a meeting with N.J. Governor John Corzine, Clintion advisor Ann Lewis and Clinton fundraiser Rob Reniner:
"Because of Democratic Party rules mandating proportional representation, Clinton cannot statistically catch up to Obama's 164-delegate lead from the primaries and caucuses. But the popular vote -- contrary to expectations -- may be a different matter. In outlining the pro-Clinton math, Reiner began with the reality that most calculations put Obama more than 700,000 votes ahead. But that number excludes the results of the outlaw primaries in Michigan (where Obama's name was not even on the ballot) and Florida. Reiner, though, added in Clinton's tarnished Florida victory, reducing her overall deficit to 400,000 votes, using a little sleight-of-hand. "We can almost make that up here in Pennsylvania," he said. "Then if we do that well in Pennsylvania, we're going to wind up very well in Indiana, in Kentucky, in West Virginia. And by the time we get to Puerto Rico -- people don't understand that Puerto Rico has a lot of voters, 2 million voters. We can pick up 400,000-500,000 there with the popular vote."
Yep, they're only angle left is the so-called popular vote, which her surrogates, including McAuliffe, Wofson and Bill continue to pound. Of course, using a popular vote count completely discounts all of us in Washington state. If she happens to win this so-called popular vote, and the remaining superdelegates and voters believe that she was somehow 'cheated' out of the nomination, this could do irreparable harm to Obama's GE chances.
Suoperdelegates won't overturn the outcome based on popular vote from non-Electoral College areas, if they consider popular vote at all.
And popular vote has no direct effect on the outcome, other than as an argument to the superdelegates.
Clinton's backers there succeeded in getting Puerto Rico to switch from a caucus to a primary, and they are also succeeded in getting a statehood referendum on the ballot, which is a huge issue there.
Wow... the statehood thing sounds an awful lot like ballot stuffing to me. Increase the turnout among people who haven't been following the election to give an advantage to the candidate with superior name recognition. Nice. Not.
Of course, some of the people there for the referendum won't vote in the primary... but still...
Any popular vote that comes out of Puerto Rico will mean nothing to the superdelegates as they can't vote in the general election.
She has earned the legacy of burning down the house and it's disgusting.
There is NO referendum on the island on the 1st. If you have direct sources, link them, otherwise stop making arguments about the nature of the primary there that are completely erroneous.
Your popular vote estimates are not "ridiculously optimistic" for Clint