Red State Blue State Purple State Popular Vote

I did some analysis this week on the issue of the popular vote breakdown between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in all kinds of states, to see if there is any validity to Hillary Clinton's arguments concerning the relative merits of Hillary v. Obama in the states that Democrats need to win in November.  

I have divided the states up into two initial categories:  Blue States (states that went for Kerry in 2004) and Red States (states that went for Bush in 2004).  I then selected a set of Purple States, which were battleground states in 2004:  Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Ohio, Missouri, and New Mexico.

For all these states, I used the popular vote count available on Real Clear Politics.  Note - there HAVE BEEN NO RELEASED POPULAR VOTE COUNTS from Nevada, Iowa, Maine and Washington State, all of which are purple states.  Given what we know about turnout, it's likely that these three states would probably net Obama additional popular vote (although I'm unclear on how much).

The results are that Senator Obama has won every category of state, Red, Blue and Purple.  Analysis after the flip.

I have published my analysis here.
Note - I eliminated non-voting primaries or caucuses, such as American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, and Democrats abroad.  Since they do not have electoral votes, I felt this was appropriate.  This marginally hurt Senator Obama.

In Red States, Senator Obama has a popular vote advantage of 6,123,662 to 5,615,453, or 52.2% to 47.8%.  

In Blue States, Senator Obama has a popular vote advantage of 7,140,001 to 6,953,778, or 50.7% to 49.3%.

In Purple States, Senator Obama has a popular vote advantage of
2,353,297 to 2,315,219, or 50.4% to 49.6% - his narrowest margin.

However, when the estimated turnout of the caucuses are applied to the end results of county/state delegates (only rough estimates, I know, but the best we can do), Obama increases his  lead in all but the Red States.  Factoring in the IA, NV, ME and WA caucuses, you get:

Red States:  Obama 6,259,640 to 5,740,267, 52.2% to 47.8%
Blue States: Obama 7,336,325 to 7,050,132, 51.0% to 49.0%
Purple States: Obama 2,658,275 to 2,518,033, 51.35% to 48.65%

Anyway you slice it, he's ahead.

The remaining states are likely to change this mix only marginally, as the Obama spreadsheet shows them roughly splitting the delegates the rest of the way.  

•  Tip Jar

  Maybe it's not THE math, but it is math nonetheless.

  by VaAntirepublican on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 02:33:10 PM PDT

•  Thanks

  For the breakdown.

  You just forgot to exclude states that don't matter though.

  I mean seriously we know only CA NY OH and PA matter!

  by bshanna on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 02:37:55 PM PDT

  •  and Texas

    Which they thinnk they won.

    I think that New Jersey matters too and maybe Massachusets.

    by bedir than average on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 02:39:25 PM PDT

•  I dug up turnout estimates for NV, IA, ME, and WA

  And this is what I came up with. Same results as you.

  Numbers don't lie. HRC can't win without overturning the will of the (nonsuperdelegate) voters.

  by dawnt on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 02:41:46 PM PDT

  •  You had a much larger turnout in WA

    Where did you get that estimate from?

    by VaAntirepublican on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 02:46:46 PM PDT

    •  From the WA dem party

      I got the estimated total turnout from the state party. Then I used the estimated percentages won for each candidate to estimate how many people voted for each candidate.

      by dawnt on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 03:06:13 PM PDT

      •  Link?

        The primary had something like 700k voters, but the caucus turnout was more limited.  Obviously, having such radically different numbers in WA affects the Blue State / Purple State analysis.

        by VaAntirepublican on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 03:11:55 PM PDT

        •  I had to call them, couldn't find anything online

          I called after the caucus, before the primary. I had to call 3 times too. I wouldn't trust my numbers 100% for Washington, but I figure it lies within a 90% confidence interval (hopefully).

          by dawnt on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 03:16:20 PM PDT

•  popular vote totals

  Your vote analysis of red, blue, and purple states helps to show how broad Obama's support is. I was interested in how you expanded the vote totals for the caucus states to make them comparable to those of the states that had primaries. I have a long comment about that below:

  Why Total Votes is an Ambiguous Statistic

  What do the election results tell us about which of the two Democratic Party candidates for president is winning the race? In discussion of the results attention has been focused on three statistics: (1) total pledged delegates; (2) number of states won; and (3) the cumulative total votes across all states. Obama has already attained a majority of states and appears to have a nearly insurmountable lead in number of pledged delegates. The only statistic where Clinton could conceivably overtake Obama is total votes. However, unlike the other two statistics, total votes is a very ambiguous and misleading statistic because it involves treating primary election and caucus results as if they were the same.
  The problem of simply adding up vote tallies in primary elections and in caucuses can be seen by looking at the results for Iowa. Because it comes first, the contest in Iowa is one of the most visible and hard fought of nomination battles. The total number of "votes" cast in the Iowa caucuses was 2,501. The state that is closest in population to Iowa is Mississippi. The total number of votes cast in the Mississippi primary election was 410,825. In a tally of total votes where caucus figures are treated as equivalent to primary election figures, Mississippi counts for 164 times as much as Iowa even though the states are almost identical in population.
  This example demonstrates how simply adding total votes in caucus states to the votes in primary election states unfairly discounts the influence of the caucus states in the national total vote figures. Since Obama has won twelve of the thirteen states where delegates are selected only by caucus, simply adding caucus votes to primary votes grossly understates the amount of public support that he has received from voters.
  The most direct way of adjusting for difference in scale between caucuses and primaries is to expand the raw caucus figures by an appropriate statistical weighting procedure to make the caucus figures equivalent to primary election figures. Take the  example of Iowa and Mississippi. In the Iowa caucuses, Obama got 940 votes which was 38% of the total votes cast. Clinton got 737 votes which was 29% of the total votes cast. Obama’s margin over Clinton was 213 votes. Since Iowa and Mississippi are approximately the same size, we can hypothesize that in a primary election, Iowans might also have cast about 400,000 votes. If Obama would have obtained 38% of those votes he would have received 152,000, and Clinton’s 29% would translate into 116,000 votes. Obama’s margin would have been 36,000 votes rather than just 213.
  Obama’s total margin of victory for all the caucus states was about 184,000. The total number of votes cast in these caucuses corresponded to less than two per cent of the total population of those states. In the states that have held primaries, the total number of votes cast corresponded to about 12.3 per cent of the total population of those states. (In these calculations I excluded Texas and Washington because they had both a primary and caucuses, and Florida and Michigan because of the dispute about the status of their primary elections). If the total votes cast in the caucus states had been equal to 12.3 per cent of their population, Obama’s total margin of victory would have been a little over one million votes, that is, more than eight hundred thousand votes greater than it was. That would more than double the lead in total votes that Obama presently has over Clinton.
  A crucial assumption used in this example is that if instead of caucuses there had been primary elections in Iowa and the other caucus states, the relative numbers of votes received by each candidate would have been the same. This assumption would not be acceptable if the method of voting has an influence on the results. But in the absence of that assumption, it is hard to see how a weighting system could be devised that would address the bias against caucus states that results from treating their vote totals the same as the vote totals in the primary states. Other methodological refinements could be made in the weighting process, for example, measuring voter turnout in relation to party registrations rather than state population. However, these are secondary to the assumption that the only difference between caucus and primary results would be in the total number of votes cast, not how they are divided between candidates. If we are not prepared to accept that crucial assumption, then it is very misleading to add the two sets of figures. In that case, producing total national vote figures serves no useful purpose, and we are left with only delegate counts and states won as valid national statistics.  

  by Wigan on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 02:44:07 PM PDT

•  2004 results. adjusted for population:

  

  by SpamNunn on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 02:45:56 PM PDT

  •  More good comparative cartograms, here:

    http://images.google.com/...

    by SpamNunn on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 02:48:13 PM PDT

•  Problems with Popular Votes

  I appreciate the effort here to try and divine the whole total or popular vote.  But, as the various assumptions at work in the above diary (and those who have commented here and elsewhere throughout dkos) total popular vote is a fiction.

  The problems are multiple:

  1.  There is great difficulty in coming up with an accepted calculation for caucuses and then comparing them to primary states.

  2.  Texas and WA had both caucuses and primaries.

  3.  What to do w/ FLA and MI?

  I can guarantee you that if the popular vote is close enough both candidates will use whatever formulations benefit them.  Which is why we should abandon alltogether the whole search for a popular vote winner in the first place.  This is an election about delegates, not popular votes.  Whoever wins the most delegates should be our nominee.  

  by Our Past on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 02:54:30 PM PDT

•  It's probably just because I'm dense

  but I fail to see how intra party primary votes explain how a state will vote in an inter party election. Trying to use examples fair to both sides, if Obama had won the Utah Democratic primary in the greatest landslide in electoral history I still wouldn't count on Obama winning Utah's electoral delegates in the Fall. Conversely, I'm not certain that if Obama was caught in bed with a dead girl and a live boy, I'm not certain it would cost him New York's electoral votes (easy, NY'ers, born and raised there, got chops to say that). If we try to read GE trends into primary results we may as well examine pigeon entrails.

  by DaNang65 on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 03:45:16 PM PDT

  •  I agree 100%

    My point was that no matter what way you slice it, Senator Obama has had more support in the Democratic nomination process.  

    It may be possible for someone to construct a rational argument that a candidate that ONLY did well in one set of states (e.g. winning 90-10 in deep red states, but losing all the blue states 55-45) would not be a good Democratic candidate.  The historic example for this would be the 1860 Democratic Convention, where Breckenridge walked out and Douglas ran as a Northern Democrat and Breckenridge as a Southern Democrat.  But that case was obviously extreme and rare.

    Here, Senator Obama is beating Senator Clinton in every possible measurement, and is likely to do so throughout the remainder of the process.  There would have to be some serious surprises along the way for anything to come out otherwise.

    And, of course, it's silly to suggest that Obama losing in California would mean that California is in play in the fall, or that Clinton losing in Illinois would make Illinois in play in the fall if she won the nomination.

    by VaAntirepublican on Sun Mar 16, 2008 at 04:12:58 PM PDT