Right now, according to Real Clear Politics, Clinton is leading the popular vote for president by over 2.5 million votes. That figure includes the states of Hawaii, Washington, and Alaska which were the last to vote before tomorrow’s primary in WI. Clinton’s popular vote lead is often overlooked by the media which wants a horse race between Sanders and Clinton for a variety of reasons. Interestingly while Clinton does mention it on occasion, it hasn’t become a standard talking point of her campaign.
Clinton’s lead means that she is winning the popular vote by almost 16 percentage points, with Clinton getting 58.2% of the popular vote and Sanders getting 42.8% of the popular vote. In short she has a very large lead in the popular vote. Indeed if there was a national primary and the winner won by almost 16% it would be considered a landslide win.
If Clinton continues to lead the popular vote among Democrats then she has a very good argument that she should be the nominee of a party that calls itself the Democratic Party. If, however, Sanders was to take and keep the lead in the popular vote, then he would have the better argument.
So the question becomes why shouldn’t the person who wins the popular vote be the party’s nominee? Both will have had the opportunity to make the case to the Democratic Party’s voters. Both seem to have the money to wage competitive campaigns. In short there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why both sides shouldn’t be willing to let the voters in the primaries and caucuses pick the nominee.
Further focusing on the popular vote would mean that neither candidate should drop out before all the votes have been counted, which won’t happen until June 14. It would also mean that the back and forth over whether there should or shouldn’t be super-delegates would be irrelevant. The super-delegates would be pressured to support whichever candidate wins the popular vote.
It is easy for partisans of either candidate to believe that regardless of who wins the popular vote, their candidate would be the stronger candidate in the fall. I understand the arguments and have made some of them myself. But at the end of the day either Sanders or Clinton will be the Democratic Party’s nominee. Why shouldn’t we all agree that whoever has received the most votes in the primaries and caucuses deserves to be the nominee and deserves to be the person the party gets behind to win what is going to be a very tough campaign?
I voted for Clinton in my state’s primary but if Sanders wins the popular vote then he deserves the nomination and I would enthusiastically get behind him. In such a situation he will have demonstrated that he is the choice of the nation’s Democratic voters who chose to participate in the primaries and caucuses.
What would bother me would be if either Clinton or Sanders loses the popular vote but still manages to get the Party’s nomination. In 2008 Obama barely edged out Clinton in the popular vote depending on whether you counted Michigan where Obama didn’t appear on the ballot and what estimate of the votes you used for IA, NV, WA, and ME. Depending on how you counted those votes, Obama either won the popular vote with a range of +151,844 to + 41622 or Clinton won the popular vote with a range of +176,465 to + 286687. (You can see the 2008 results here.)
In 2016, however, there doesn’t seem to be the uncertainty regarding the results of the primaries and caucuses. If you examine the links to the RealClearPolitics.com pages for the 2008 and the 2016 Democratic popular vote results set forth above there are asterisks for the 2008 results but not for the 2016 results.
Therefore there doesn’t seem to be a reason to argue that the vote totals being reported for the primaries and caucuses aren’t accurate, or, at the least, aren’t inaccurate enough to make a difference.
Thus were either candidate to claim the nomination without winning the popular vote in this year’s nominating battle it would certainly have the appearance of appearing to be a nomination without a mandate or at least without a mandate from the voters who took part in the nomination process.
Given the rancor that appears to be taking over the battle for the Democratic Party’s nomination I don’t expect the idea of letting actual voters have the last word will have much support from the die hard backers of either candidate and maybe they would be right. But the idea of the Democratic Party nominating someone who hasn’t gotten the most votes in the primaries and caucuses doesn’t seem very democratic. In fact it appears down right Republican.