On Wednesday we brought you a post totaling up the popular votes cast so far for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, concluding that Obama's lead to date is so strong that it still holds even if you include Michigan and Florida — which is to be expected, considering that Democratic primaries allocate pledged delegates on a roughly proportional basis, and he currently has a big lead with pledged delegates. But this invites another question: How would the two candidates be doing if Dem primaries were winner-take-all, like many Republican contests?

We did the math over here, hypothetically assigning all delegates from a state to whoever won that primary or caucus, and here's what we get:

States With Recognized Delegates

	Delegates
Obama	1,096
Clinton	1,075

Including Florida And Michigan

	Delegates
Obama	1,096
Clinton	1,414

Further analysis after the jump.

Of course, if the race had been winner-take-all from the start, Obama's strategy would have been very different. In the race as it's played out, his approach leading up to Super Tuesday was to keep the margins close in big states where he was having trouble, and then to run up the score in smaller states where Hillary wasn't really trying to compete.

And consider this: A WTA rule would have vastly changed the common spin on the race after Super Tuesday, which in the real world was regarded as a narrow Obama victory. With the same states going to the same candidates, the pledged delegate score after Super Tuesday would have been 1,075 for Hillary against only 743 for Obama, without even counting Michigan and Florida — whereas Obama had won about two dozen more delegates at that point under the proportional system.

In a way, it almost seems like the Hillary campaign was running as if the Dems did WTA primaries, while the Obama camp was running to maximize their strengths under the proportional system.