A Sane Discussion Of Hillary And The Popular Vote
I want to heartily recommend Hendrik Hertzberg's discussion of Hillary's popular vote endgame in the current New Yorker. Hertzberg brings to his analysis a level of nuance and fairness that's been missing from much writing on the subject.
After noting that the popular vote has "no official significance" in our nominating process, Hertzberg breaks down all the different ways of counting the popular vote -- with or without caucus states; including and not including the vote counts in Florida and Michigan, in all their permutations -- and concludes that Obama leads by most counts. He will be the nominee, Hertzberg says...
In a nominating process, especially this one, the "popular vote" is an elusive phenomenon. RealClearPolitics.com, an independent Web site whose numbers political reporters and operatives tend to trust, maintains six separate tallies. At the moment, Obama leads in four of them...Next week, after the three remaining primaries -- Clinton is expected to sweep the largest of them, Puerto Rico's -- the likelihood is that each candidate will be able to point to "metrics" showing that he or she is the people's choice. Obama will almost certainly have the better case, especially in view of opinion polls showing that his national lead among Democrats has been growing, but the reality is that the two have been almost equally strong. Obama will remain the leader in the delegate count, owing largely to a more astute strategy, and he will be the nominee. If there is a loftier lesson, it is that the nominating "system"--and not just in the Democratic Party--is an irrational mess.
Hertzberg's analysis is noteworthy because he appears to be able to allow several ideas to coexist in his head simultaneously, which quite an achievement these days.
For instance, Hertzberg rightly criticizes Hillary's over-the-top rhetoric about the sanctity of voting, and rightly pillories her "we're winning the popular vote" formulation.
But he doesn't indulge in superfluous speculation about Hillary's motives, and also makes the perfectly legitimate suggestion that our screwed up nominating system -- in addition to Hillary's gaming of it -- is also to blame for the current state of the political conversation. Even if you soundly reject Hillary's arguments as pure Lady-Macbethian cynicism, and even if you think they'll fail, which they almost certainly will, the fact remains that it is within her rights under party rules to make them to super-delegates, and super-delegates are free to listen to them if they wish.
What's more, Hertzberg also insists on making a nuanced argument, rather than a simplistic one. He allows for the fact that the popular vote does carry some weight as a metric with Democrats, and possibly even super-delegates, suggesting that its significance shouldn't be blithely dismissed. At the same time, he accurately notes that Obama is winning by most ways of counting the popular vote, and that ultimately only the delegate count officially matters -- meaning Obama will win the nomination. Yes, all these ideas can coexist.
Hertzberg's last line is a bit overheated, but it's a good piece. Read the whole thing.
Late Update: On reflection, I actually think Hertzberg's whole last graf is over the top, but I still think on balance this is one of the fairer analyses of the situation we've seen.
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