This is a first time diary for me. (I wrote a report from my caucus, but don't quite count that as the same thing. Mostly I have been a shy lurker who is warming up through comments.)
I want to make a proposal for how to treat this myth of popular vote. There is so much written about it, so much debate about Florida and Michigan and different ways to arrive at the numbers. There have been voices saying popular vote doesn't exist, but mostly the concept has been given credence by all the arguments about ways to calculate it. In most of those arguments I have read, very rarely do facts about why it doesn't even exist get much of a nod.
There is a simple way to push back on the inevitability of a wrongful frame, which is to reframe in everything you say about the issue and get as many people as possible to participate. I will elaborate below, but the gist is this: There is no such thing as a national 'popular vote'. Does not exist. Cannot be found. Period. Details below, but first a quotation from another diary today http://www.dailykos.com/...
The critical thing to realize is that because the notion of a popular
vote metric exists at all, THE CLINTON CAMPAIGN HAS
ALREADY WON this battle.
It does no good to go on railing endlessly about how there is no
such thing as a valid 'popular vote' metric; it does no good to
suggest that it is absurd to count Clinton's Michigan votes; it does
no good to decry the absurdity of adding Minnesota's caucus votes to
Missouri's primary votes.
Why? Because the 'popular vote' meme is out there, in spades
(resonating all the more strongly because of the 2000 Presidential
election). The Clinton campaign has successfully caused this idea to
be planted in the minds of a) the media, b) the public and, most
importantly, c) some superdelegates.
I don't believe in conceding this frame. I don't write this from a huge concern that super-delegates are buying it, but more from an interest in the truth. If there ever was a time in history to care about voting integrity, this would be it. Not wanting to stand for any fraudulence in my own party. So, even if this popular vote thing turns out okay in the end for my candidate, I want to have contributed to increasing the truthfulness of the dialog about it along the way.
So, why doesn't 'popular vote' exist nationally?
Simplest formulation is that it doesn't exist because it can't be found.
Numbers for most states (44) can be found. No argument. Numbers for Michigan and Florida cannot be found, for many and tortured reasons, with campaign camps arguing about this until the super-delegates come home, but that's not actually the most fundamental problem.
No, popular vote is not a national metric and can't become one, because four states do not report popular vote and for those four states it can't be found. No argument.
These four states, Washington (yes, that's my state), Iowa, Maine and Nevada, are following the longstanding rules of the party. Yes, this fact has to do with how the whole process was set up, the DNC, historical precedent, all of that, but getting into those complexities only helps fog up the visibility of the most basic fact:
There is no national 'popular vote' as a discoverable metric.
Getting into Florida and Michigan around 'popular vote' only helps fog this same basic fact. Argue delegates, but don't even begin arguing a 'popular vote' those two states could hammer out.
I am proposing to get really simple about this and hammer away, by referring to this in every discussion or venue when the topic comes up, to use any ins to the Obama campaign to get them to talk clearly about this. Frames work best if simple, immediately graspable and maximally used.
Someone else said in a comment earlier, that the more you have to explain and elaborate, the worse your legitimacy (they were referring to the Clinton arguments about all of this.) I agree, but respectfully suggest that a lot of the talk from Obama supporters is also doing too much explaining and elaborating.
Let's cut for the jugular on this myth. There. is. no. national. popular. vote. period.
I'm not proposing a major initiative of new energy here, just that in the course of campaign dialog, don't overlook opportunities to frame this accurately, and stay away from legitimizing a metric by debating it. If you want to celebrate that Obama is ahead in this mythical metric, okay, but label it mythical and briefly say why. That's all. It would be a good contribution.