In my post at Calitics, I have been covering the primary election on the Democratic side. It was well known on Election Day that there would be a long counting process, with up to a million votes uncounted after February 5. Needless to say, that meant that the vote totals on Election Day would bear no resemblance to the vote totals at the end of the process. The certification of the vote will officially come on March 15, but today is the deadline for counties to get their totals in to the Secretary of State's office.
While following the vote count, it was clear that the numbers would inch up for Barack Obama, as they did in California almost immediately after the early absentee ballots were announced right after the polls closed on February 5. Between the night of February 5 and February 6 Obama picked up a number of delegates just by virtue of places like Alameda County finishing their counting. And subsequently, the numbers fell in his favor, though in small amounts. A couple weeks ago, Obama gained enough in CA-53, a 5-delegate district, to take the lead. But that was really the last significant change. So on March 4 (which I thought was the certification day at the time) I posted what I thought was an unexceptional story stating that Hillary Clinton would receive 203 delegates in the state, compared to Barack Obama's 167 delegates.
I really hadn't followed the national numbers, so it came as something of a surprise to me when that post was picked up throughout the blogosphere as evidence of a "shift" in delegates. Nothing had changed for a couple weeks, after all. But it turned out that the national media was still reporting a 207-163 split in their delegate counts. I have no idea what this was based on. But it's clear that they simply dropped the ball and turned away from California before the final ONE MILLION ballots were counted. So I added this post:
Being that I kind of don't pay attention to the national media's delegate counts, I hadn't realized that they were all getting California so very, very wrong, and in fact are about 800,000 votes off from the official tally. Apparently many news organizations predict that Clinton will reap 207 delegates from California, and Obama 163. MSNBC has this. Real Clear Politics has this. CBS has this. The New York Times has this. CNN has it as 204-161 with 5 to be decided. They're all simply wrong, and I know math is hard and everything, but get out your calculators, people.
Here's an example at MSNBC's site. They list 2,144,251 votes for Clinton and 1,746,013 for Obama, which was right... about two weeks ago. The actual official returns, readily available at the Secretary of State's website, are 2,553,784 for Clinton and 2,126,600 for Obama. That's really, really off. The final percentage is 8.7% and MSNBC lists it as 10%. And that translates to a 70-59 split in delegates statewide. They're probably getting that wrong, too, not recognizing that there are two kinds of statewide delegates which are calculated separately. When you add in the district-level delegate allocation (and I could list them all, but trust me on this), you get 203-167. It takes about 10 minutes to come up with this and it's completely irresponsible for the national media to have this wrong for over two weeks, and to relentlessly show a graphic of delegate counts with bad, outdated information. In fact, it calls into question ALL of their other counts.
I went on to show my work at that post, which as I said, doesn't take long or involve trigonometry or anything. Within a day of that, Real Clear Politics had changed its count. The New York Times had changed its count in at least one place. And then the Wall Street Journal picked up the story and got confirmation from the state Democratic Party that my counts were, in fact, correct.
A California politics blogger has argued that Sen. Clinton won 36 more pledged delegates in the state than Sen. Obama, rather than the 44-delegate margin that has long been included in the news organizations’ tallies. A spokesman for the state party confirms the blogger’s numbers.
The shift, if validated once the state certifies its election results this week and the party chooses its delegates, is a reminder that the commonly reported delegate totals are mere estimates, subject to change as states finalize election results. It also highlights how a blogger with intense focus on the numbers may be faster than the established delegate counters.
David Dayen, who blogs at the site Calitics and serves on its editorial board, wrote last week that Sen. Clinton won 203 of the state’s 370 pledged delegates — and not the commonly reported total of 207. He relied on updated vote totals from the state, based on late counts of absentee and provisional ballots. Later, when he noticed that several major news organizations still were showing Sen. Clinton with 207 delegates, he wrote a follow-up post explaining his calculation and exhorting, “I know math is hard and everything, but get out your calculators, people.”
As a result of that post, CBS and CNN finally changed their delegate counts. And now, so has MSNBC (of course, they haven't changed the popular vote totals, so they're still screwed up). I'm waiting on my thank-you note, expecting none.
The point here is that the national media wants to distill this election down into the pure horse race, neglecting issues for the sake of covering the winners and losers. Except they're no damn good at that, either. Distracted like a firefly in front of a lamp, they turn away from states the day after the primaries and never sustain an effort to check the delegate counts. This is inexcusable. It's not that hard to occasionally go back and check the vote totals.
I wouldn't use the national media's vote counts as evidence for ANYTHING. If you want it done right, do it yourself. Everyone using these numbers to prove their point about their particular candidate is basking in ignorance. Do what I did: count the numbers yourself.
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