In claiming, ad nauseum, that she leads in the popular vote, Hillary Clinton, as many of us know, counts all 328,309 votes cast in her favor in Michigan, and assigns Obama zero. Without that 328,309 margin, her claim crumbles. Here is a little known fact -- of which even Markos seems unaware in his post today -- that the Clintons do not want anyone to know: The networks exit polled Michigan voters as they left the polls on January 15 and asked whom they would have voted for had Edwards and Obama been on the ballot. The results, as published by CNN kill the Clintons' argument. This Update includes the link, which I meant to include in the original post. Link to CNN Exit Poll
The results? Clinton 46, Obama 35, Edwards 12.
That's an eleven point margin for Hillary, out of 595,000 total votes cast, or a 65,450 vote margin. She and her supporters are therefore overstating her margin by 262,589 votes. Without those votes, she trails in the popular vote on every metric.
I would be reluctant to cite any polls -- even exits, which are the most reliable -- to prove how votes would have been cast. But the Clintonistas now are solely down to two arguments: She "won" the popular vote, and she is outperforming Obama as against McCain in hypothetical matchups in a few recent tracking polls. The Clintonistas can't very well denigrate the reliance on an exit poll conducted the day of the MI election, and at the same time make their entire case about hypothetical matchups regarding an election six months away.
Of course, the whole use of popular votes to claim victory is absurd given the rules, but I fear that Clintonistas are deliberately trying to delegitimize an Obama victory by casting him as the guy who was not the true popular choice of rank and file Democrats -- either to advantage Hillary in 2012 or out of a belief that the superdelegates will somehow buy the popular vote argument. UPDATE: And for the record, it's clear to me that Obama would have either won or come closer than 11 points had he campaigned in MI. My point here is that the Clintons lose even on their own logic.
Get this fact out there, and recommend this Diary if you think that this fact is not sufficiently well known.