There are more ways to count the popular vote (by my count, 972) than there are to eat a Whopper. And now you can pick your favorite.
Note: I had originally used 200,000 as my estimate for Washington caucus turnout, which is a fairly widely reported figure. However, the Washington State Democrats estimate that "more than 250,000" persons participated in their caucus, so I am now using 250,000 instead.
The spreadsheet lets you make seven different choices about how to count the popular vote:
1. Count Florida fully, at 50 percent, or not at all.
2. Count Michigan fully, at 50 percent, or not at all.
3. Don't count the Michigan uncommitteds, or count them for Obama, or allocate the Michigan uncommitteds based on the exit poll results, or allocate ALL Michigan votes based on the exit poll results (this distinction is important because roughly 20 percent of Clinton voters said they actually preferred another candidate).
4. Count Puerto Rico and other territories, or just the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
5. Count the Texas caucuses, or don't count them, or count both the Texas caucus and the Texas primary at 50 percent.
6. Count the advisory primaries in Nebraska, Washington and Idaho or not.
7. Count the estimated caucus votes in Washington, Maine, Iowa and Nevada, or only count caucuses with "hard" voting totals, or don't count caucuses at all.
EDIT: If you want to use the original, hard-copy XLS version, that link can be found here.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Popular Vote Scenario Tester, Online Version [UPDATED]
-- Nate Silver at 7:27 PM
Labels: popular vote, primaries
53 comments
I think if you make that a google spreadsheet, you can have it work live on your site.
So really, what this is saying, is that any candidate can spin the facts by not counting any primaries or caucuses that he or she doesn't think are important. So when Hillary says that she won the popular vote, she is probably excluding Texas' caucuses, including the full delegation for Michigan and Florida, and not counting the caucus states. I wonder out the 972 ways to count the popular vote, I wonder how many of them favor each candidate.
LOL. Poblano, you are BRILLIANT to do this.
Here is my favorite way to count the popular vote. (By favorite I don't mean that I think it's fair, but that it's one that includes Hillary's crazy metrics while still being somewhat sane)
-Count Florida
-Count Puerto Rico and the territories
-Estimate the Caucuses
-Count Michigan. BUT also count the 237,000 who voted Uncommitted and the 30,000 who wrote their candidates' name in as 2/3 Obama supporters.
Voila. After Montana and South Dakota vote, Obama will lead by about 30,000 votes using this metric. Using a SANE metric he leads by more than 400,000.
This is very interesting. I think it is a political mistake for Clinton to argue so adamantly that she wins the popular vote (also not true under most reasonable scenarios). It has the effect of pissing off Obama supporters, who are people she would need to have a chance in 2012 or 2016. Even when she backs Obama strongly in the next week, I think a lot of Obama supporters won't forget her exagerations/overstatements when her next chance comes.
Cool, but the 50/50 weight for the Texas caucus and primary seems arbitrary. It would make more sense to use the delegate weighting assigned by the Texas Democrats:
Primary: (126/193) = 65.3%
Caucus: (67/193) = 34.7%
This is how the voters in Texas were told their votes would be weighted, so it would seem to be the most reasonable way to respect both contests without double-counting.
This site is utterly fab and extremely informative. I'm from the UK so the nuances of US elections aren't always completely obvious to me, so please bear with me if my questions are ludicrous.
1) Why argue the popular vote when it's not only just not how either major party elects its candidates but also not how you elect a president?
2) Is there any political will to move from the Electoral College to the popular vote in presidential elections?
anonymous@18:07, if her concern is 2012 then she has to first ensure that Obama loses to McCain. Even after all her sabotage, the GE is at best a draw right now. This has necessitated a continuation of fostering white and female resentment against Obama, but doing it in such a way as to retain plausible deniability ("I was just making a historical statement") and exploit the good spirit of Democrats who don't want to think the Clintons capable of placing themselves above the party.
It has worked. Very few people are seeing past her facade, and even fewer are revealing it. Many Obama supporters, even the high-info ones on blogs, refuse to even entertain the notion that Clinton is engaging in sabotage.
Obama, his surrogates and the party leaders are allowing Clinton free reign to kamikaze the GE in the hope that she'll stop and endorse after 6/3. John Cole used the perfect analogy when he called it a hostage crisis. But her time is running out. Before long, her poisonous strategy will become too transparent and then she really will be destroying her future. That's why I remain confident she'll drop out in the next week or two.
@Leila
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
wow the great thing about the internet is ya think of something and boom there it is.
if only it had check boxes instead of fields to type into and if only it was wide enough to actually SEE. (that goes for this page too which appears in a non scrollable popup window that is real small for some reason)
it seems to me that if you do anything fair, obama wins the popular vote by LOTS, not that the popular vote matters in a contest for delegates. the rules are the rules, hillary, and you can't just change them um, every 5 minutes. this isn't the GOP here.
Mr. Silver,
Is there any way of making it such that one can use the WA, NE and ID primaries INSTEAD of the caucuses? Counting the votes of those that went to caucus and primaries double-counts folks that are over-represented as it is due to the iniquities of primaries.
Leila, if they used the electoral college vote in the Democratic Primaries, Clinton would be winning about 300-240 (and still winning if you threw out Florida and Michigan).
Also, unlike British leadership races, Americans are more inclined to see the primaries as a bigger democratic process, rather than a party function. In particular, a lot of people (esp. in the Democratic party) are sore over Gore's loss in 2000, despite winning the popular vote.
The Democratic insistence on QUASI-proportional rules (caucuses betray the principles of proportional representation and some districts are valued more than others - a factor that has benefited Obama) is probably a bad thing for what should be a partisan leadership race aimed at selecting the strongest nominee. Why?
1. Proportionality prolongs presidential races in a way that winner-take-all rules do not (if you can end the race early you don't have to quibble about the popular vote).
2. Proportionality requires arcane rules that both camps will quibble about.
I also think staggered primaries are yet another factor that induces irrationality into the process. For instance, there was much talk of Obama's "momentum" after Super Tuesday, and then Clinton's, when both were essentially winning the states that you would expect, based on demographics. Would Obama have been "inevitable" if the first three primaries after Super Tuesday were Kentucky, West Virginia and Puerto Rico?
This also makes some states more important than others, which benefits certain special interests over general interests (eg. the ethanol lobby). In a simultaneous national primary you would have to address the lobbies you are paying off, as well as the folks you are screwing in order to pay off those interests.
Finally, 1968 gave Americans an irrational fear of contested conventions. They are not a bad thing - just move the convention and primaries earlier, to give more time before the general election. Contested conventions mean deal-making and horse-trading, encouraging a united party.
Vosh, Clinton has barely mentioned Obama in the past two weeks (apart from the RFK comments, which hardly helped her). If Obama really is a great uniter and saviour of mankind, why can't he unite his party? Secretary of Health and Human services (which he is rumoured to be offering) is a piss-poor offering to the woman who owns his balls right now.
I am a fractal,
no, actually you misunderstand the rules, and the reason for the popular vote argument. Yes, delegates matter, but 800 are super-delegates, which can decide by whatever metric they want. Typically they weigh two considerations - what is the will of the party, and who can win in November. The popular vote argument is about swaying super-delegates, and if you sway super-delegates, then you have the delegates. Simply looking at pledged delegates is problematic because 1. caucuses are unrepresentative, and 2. delegate results in primaries were skewed to Obama because he did better in traditionally democratic congressional districts, which were weighted more heavily (generally heavily African American congressional districts in cities).
Democrats overwhelmingly prefer the popular vote as that metric (go to pollingreport.com, there are some polls on the subject featured there), or "choose the best candidate" metrics (eg. winnability). So it is an argument with more legs than you give it. Of course the aim of the Clinton camp is to say that it is so close that either candidate has a legitimate claim to the nomination - thus, super-delegates should take a look at which candidate is most likely to win.
*(and there is a sane scenario where Clinton wins - uncommitted to Obama, keep Florida, keep caucuses, but replace WA, NE and ID caucuses with the primaries where MORE people voted and an actual tally was made).
Count the Texas caucus? Give me a break. Who other than this site is even talking about this? You do realize that only people who voted in the Texas primary earlier in the day could vote in the caucus. You are double-counting people by counting the caucus separately. But you apparently want to throw any insane options in to cast doubt on the validity of the popular vote, right? Katherine Harris would be proud. All those Jewish ladies must have intended to vote for Pat Buchanan.
I should clarify - I still want to include Maine, Nevada, and all the caucuses, except those where advisory primaries were held (ID, WA, NE).
I think this is the fairest way to go about it. Florida and Michigan count - their delegates were seated (uncommitted went to Obama, so fine, you can give Obama the uncommitted). Caucuses should count too, but not when there was a primary (since primaries are more represented, although it would be silly to count people twice). That applies to Texas as well.
Without using the advisory caucuses, Obama leads by 28,247. Tossing them in...
Obama won the Idaho caucus almost 80-17 getting a margin of 13,200. In the primary it was 56-38, with a margin of 8,000.
Jay Cost's popular vote calculator reduces Obama's margin by 50,000 when the WA primary is used.
In Nebraska Obama won the caucus by 14,000 but the primary by only 2,600.
All told Clinton nets 67,000 votes using this alternate calculation, passing Obama by 40,000. Obama will need better than 14 point wins in SD and Montana to pass that - doable, but not in the bank yet (of course they are so close this is rather arbitrary).
It is estimated that approximately a million voters took the time to participate in the Texas caucuses because they were told their votes would count. Try telling them that they wasted their time because of a retroactive rule change.
The voters in Texas were told that the primary counted for about 2/3 of a vote, and a caucus counted for about 1/3 of a vote. That's the way they chose to set up their system. Voters were free to change their minds in the caucus and vote for someone other than who they voted for in the primary.
The voters were told the Texas caucus would count, and it should. On the other hand, voters in Michigan were told (by Clinton) that their votes would not count. How can you justify counting the Michigan votes but not the Texas caucus votes? You can't.
As for WA, ID, and NE, it's ridiculous to count contests that the voters were told were mere beauty contests. It's as if we woke up to find out that a straw poll on CNN's web site yesterday was going to be retroactively used to decide the nominee. Surprise!