Election 2008: It’s the Questions that Drive Us, Neo

A few questions:

(1) Why does the MSM insist on treating Michigan and Florida as Hillary victories (e.g., in the color maps)? Not only did the candidates not campaign in those states, many voters stayed home because they thought the elections wouldn’t count. Indeed, as a snarky comment, you could say that if it’s true that Obama’s supporters are better educated than Hillary’s, perhaps they were far more likely to stay home in Florida and Michigan because they better understood it was a colossal waste of time. In Michigan’s case, Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. Shouldn’t the television media illustrate the states in a neutral color to denote “ineligible” — rather than treat them as genuine Hillary victories? The problem with the media’s treatment is it allows Hillary to misleadingly assert the larger political argument, as she did during her Ohio victory speech, that she “won” the battleground states of Florida and Michigan.

 

(2) Isn’t the MSM confusing general election contests, in which the popular vote in each state triggers the award of all of its electoral votes (ignoring footnotes for Nebraska and Maine), with pre-nomination contests (primaries and caucuses), in which raw popular vote does not necessarily drive delegate awards? In the pre-nomination contests, delegate awards are tied to congressional district victories and other arcane delegate allocations within each state. The only thing that matters in the pre-nomination contests is accumulating the delegates necessary to win the nomination. Therefore, winning the majority of a state’s delegates should be the way to judge a state victory, not the beauty contest of who won the popular vote. After all, that’s why the MSM ignored the Democratic primary in Washington State: it was a popular vote beauty contest that did not award any delegates – the prior Washington State caucus awarded its delegates. Therefore, Nevada and Texas should be treated as Obama victories because he won the majority of delegates in those states, despite losing the beauty contest. Indeed, this is particularly true in the case of Texas, where the state has defined its pre-nomination contest as a combination of primary and caucus results (65-35%, respectively).  Treating popular vote majority votes in pre-nomination contests as victories in states where the “loser” got the most delegates is like treating the 2000 election as a Gore victory despite Bush getting more electoral votes (Florida chaos aside).

(3) Ok, now that I’ve made the point about how the MSM is incorrectly treating the pre-nomination contests in the same way they treat general election contests, let me make raise a completely different issue: one of political perception. That is, while the popular vote is not relevant in the primaries in the same way as in the general election, it is clearly being emphasized by both campaigns to make a moral argument to persuade super delegates. Right now, Obama leads in the total popular vote.

What the MSM misses here, however, is that you can’t consider the popular vote without acknowledging that you can’t compare primaries and caucuses as apples-to-apples. Obama’s victories included all the caucus states (again, Nevada and the Texas primacaucus are Obama victories under #3, above). By structural design, caucuses don’t include as many voters as primaries and aren’t recorded in the same manner as in primaries. A candidate who has a significant number of caucus wins ends up necessarily getting less popular votes than he or she would have if they had been primary victories. Obama’s lead in the national popular vote is that much more impressive when you consider so many of his victories were in caucus states. In addition, several of Hillary’s primary victories were in the largest states: California, New York, Ohio, New Jersey and, at least in the primary portion of its “primacaucus”, Texas. The very fact that Obama has the lead in the popular vote speaks to the strength of his primary victories (e.g., Virginia, Louisiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, South Carolina and Georgia).

The trick is that Obama’s lead is not that large, and Pennsylvania is a huge primary state on the horizon. Even if he were to continue to win a majority of the remaining states, a primary victory by Hillary in Pennsylvania (as Obama has already predicted in his campaign’s post-Super Tuesday memo of Feb. 6th) could give her the popular vote lead and with it, the false appearance of having the voters’ validation. So the question is, will the MSM bother to put this in proper context?