Running the numbers: Delegate count and Popular Vote

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday March 19, 2008 · 9:27 PM PDT

2008/03/19 · 21:27

There have been about a zillion diaries on how Hillary is so far behind and she should drop out yada yada yada.
Lets take a look at the popular vote count, though.
The NYT estimates that Obama is leading in the popular vote by 700,000 out of 26 million votes cast. Someone added up the numbers here and by this count (I subtracted FL and MI) we see that Hillary has 12335209 votes, and Obama has 12923222 votes, a difference of 588,000 voters.
This would give Hillary 48.8% and Obama 51.1%, so that Obama would have a lead of 2.3%.

That is kind of interesting, because if you run the numbers on the pledged delegates, Obama (with 1621 delegates) has a lead of 4.8% over Clinton (with 1479 delegates) - almost twice as much percentage as compared to the popular vote.
So we see that the delegate advantage isn't really corresponding to the popular vote.
There are 566 delegates to go. We can calculate an expected popular vote of 4.6 million voters. Let's say, for example, that Hillary wins the remaining states by a margin of 57 to 43 %. Actually that is not impossible, if you look at the latest PA polls.
Then she would actually be winning in the popular vote.
That's not even including FL and MI, which I think Hillary would be likely to win, but it looks like they may not re-vote.
So if the popular vote is very close I think she would have a rational argument to present to the superdelegates.

Conclusion: The Hillary supporters can conclude that the popular vote is rather close.
The Barack voters can argue that popular vote doesn't matter anyways. (but they should work hard to make sure Barack doesn't get creamed in PA !)

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

Comments are closed on this story.