I just saw a piece in Huffington Post that insists that Obama has a much higher popular vote than is commonly believed. The author points out that the county delegates reported for caucuses aren't representative of the number of people that actually caucused.
Obviously, I've always known this. But I believed that the popular vote numbers took this into account, and tried to come up with an estimate. But...it isn't?? Anyway, the article concludes that Obama is ahead by 2-3 million votes.
More below the fold.
The theory goes like this:
Since there is no exact number of how many votes are actually represented in a caucus, let's just round it out to 20 voters per delegate, out of morbid curiosity. That means each delegate, on average, represents about 20 people, and we will multiply the final tally by 20.
....
But let's just say, for arguments sake, that we're overestimating how many people a county delegate represents. Let's call it 10 rather than 20. Then the tally becomes 271,720 votes for Obama, and 94,620 for Clinton. Still a substantial victory. And that is the absolute rock bottom lowest average estimate.
He concludes that using this conservative estimate Obama is ahead by 2,300,000 votes rather than just 800,000.
So...does any one have any insight? Is the popular vote count really mis-representing the caucus numbers? Or have the county delegates already been converted to an estimated popular vote number? I had always assumed that was the case.