... an utterly meaningless concept.
This is my first diary in 3 years and it's not even a proper diary. Almost entirely content free and a rehash of a discussion I had in the comments, it's not even a particularly original topic.
However it troubles me that this idea, of there being some importance attached to the "popular vote", just won't go away and I feel compelled to examine it one more time.
Join me after the flip...
If each state were holding an equivalent contest then sure, the popular vote might have counted for something. But they're not. Some have held primaries and some have held caucuses. Apples and oranges.
This leads us on some questions about the validity of caucuses themselves. The Clinton campaign and her supporters have raised concerns about the importance of the caucus states and the democratic strength of the process.
Caucuses have lower turnouts than Primary elections. This is a fact. Caucus states therefore allocate each delegate to a much smaller group of voters than might have been the case in a neighboring, primary state - also fact.
Does that make them less democratic? Possibly, but the two voting systems clearly involve different levels of voter participation. Caucus elections are biased towards the candidate(s) whose supporters are committed enough to attend for an extended period. There may not be as many voters but they certainly put in the hours between them.
The result in Texas has been quoted by some as an example of how the caucus system sucks at democracy. Clinton won the primary by 4% yet lost the caucus by 12%. I saw one particularly rabid commenter suggest that the caucus had somehow stolen a 16% margin of Clinton's support and that we should use this as a rationale for deducting 16% from all of Obama's caucus results.
There's not much I can say to compete with that idea, except that each state is entitled to hold a primary or a caucus (or both) and that anyone who has a problem with the Texas result should move there and start a grassroots campaign, asking the state Democratic party to change their system in advance of the 2012 nomination race.
So, going back to the question of popular vote... we have established that, in a caucus state the very nature of the process leads to lower turnout. It favors a highly energized and organized campaign that can motivate its supporters but there is clearly no way that turnout can reach the levels of a primary election.
To create a "popular vote" total that counts each of these voters as equal to a primary voter in another state is to disenfranchise the whole electorate of the caucus state. That's assuming the states even have detailed numbers of voters, which not all of them do.
Instead of trying to add apples to oranges, it would be useful if we had another system that allowed us to judge the relative popularity of each candidate in each state in a comparable way. Then we could add them together with a minimum of disenfranchisement.
Fortunately for us, we do. It's called the pledged delegate count. It's not perfect but it's the only metric that matters.