Some perspective on the primaries
Concerning Tuesday specifically, take a look at this post. Hillary's lead over Bernie both in the popular vote and in pledged delegates (that is, excluding the unelected "superdelegates") actually increased on Tuesday, reflecting the fact that her much-discussed loss in Michigan was extremely close while her Mississippi win was a blowout, 83%-to-17%. The concern expressed by some bloggers that the superdelegates are an un-democratic distortion of the nominating process shouldn't obscure the fact that, even without them, Hillary is ahead by a sizable margin.
If the Michigan result (and the inaccuracy of the polls there) is replicated in other somewhat-similar states such as Ohio and Illinois, Hillary may have a problem, but that's speculation at this point. Right now, even taking Michigan into account, she's still unequivocally winning.
posted by Infidel753 at 5:22 AM
8 Comments:
As I'm sure you know, the popular vote totals in the Presidential election matters exactly zip point shit. Oh, it's good for bragging rights, but the guy who comes up on top in California by one frigging vote has just as many electoral votes as a guy who wins VA, NC, SC and GA 85% of the vote.
So it is here. Whoever gets a majority of the delegates, in whatever round of voting happens at a convention, is the nominee. The total number of votes cast by the voters matters not a faint fart.
DailyPUMA has the same data posted on its site regarding Tuesdays Mississippi and Michigan primaries. In case you hadn't noticed DailyPUMA carries an RSS feed for your blog, would be nice to be mentioned once every four or five years, when merited.
Hillary Clinton with 125,000 more votes and 18 more delegates than Bernie Sanders from Michigan and Mississippi.
And DailyPUMA has unleashed several other unpublicized issues regarding Bernie Sanders and possible skeletons in his closet plus media sexism, all in the past week.
Misfit: In the general election, yes, but we're talking about the primaries here. Many states award delegates proportionately, not winner-take-all, which is why Hillary got almost as many delegates in Michigan as Bernie did -- because the popular vote was nearly equally split, even though any margin, however small, is declared a "win".
The popular vote also matters to the perceived legitimacy of the eventual nominee, especially when we'll eventually have to unify the Hillary and Bernie camps behind whoever we nominate. If the nominee won by a convincing popular-vote margin and with superdelegates not playing a deciding role, it will at least be easier for the other candidate's supporters to accept that it's a legitimate win.
Alessandro: Thanks, I will check it out. I must say, though, that I don't want to condone actual attacks on Bernie. He is a good man -- I simply believe Hillary is a better candidate. This has to be a clean win. We'll need Bernie and his supporters in November.
Facts- such an embarrassment to the talking heads.
Maybe that's why they so rarely mention them.
Good point about Bernie and his supporters. One way to reel them in is for Hillary Clinton to release her super-delegtes as long as they agree to not switch sides but simply stay on the sidelines until the convention.
Although Bernie Sanders appears to be a good man, I think he has some 70's "Carny" in him in the way he has hidden his wealth in wife's assets, used the his daughter's weddings to carry credit card debt so his supporters would relate when paying off the credit card debt and then donating the money saved by not having to pay up to 10,000 dollars in yearly interest rate charges to non-profits would have been a more legitimate road to take based on his anti wall street and banks positioning.
And lets not forget Mr. Sander's beyond insinuation that Hillary Clinton is in the hands of wall street and to release transcripts of her speeches to wall street. That's actual intellectual property owned by both Hillary Clinton and the payee and to just release it would be a breach. Seems like another trumped up email scenario, at the hands of Bernie Sanders. Just saying he's not quite the nice guy as it seems he could be.
I hadn't heard about any of those things, and can't say I much care. They strike me as the kind of meta-issues that are always coming up in political campaigns but don't tell us anything about what kind of policies a candidate would pursue if elected.
As for the superdelegates, they can vote as they wish regardless and don't need to be "released". But I'm glad to see that many news sites are counting superdelegates separately, so that everyone can see Hillary has a growing lead in earned delegates even without them.
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