The Weighted Popular Vote: Why Clinton Needs A Landslide

Hillary Clinton’s last hope to win the nomination is to emerge victorious in the popular vote and convince superdelegates to steal away Obama’s victory in pledged delegates. Right-wing pundit Robert Novak claimed about Clinton, "Her strongest chance is to win the nation-wide popular vote."

If the purpose of counting the popular vote is to provide a fair picture of the overall national voting, then it’s not accurate at all. What we need is a way to accurately measure the true popular vote. That’s what I’ve done in this spreadsheet with what I call the Weighted Popular Vote (WPV).

The WPV is very simple to calculate. I take the population of each state in the 2000 census, and multiply it by the percentage of votes each candidate gets in the state (excluding Michigan and Florida, since they have not yet held a valid vote). This allows us to compensate for the inevitably lower levels of voting in a caucus, since it is held at a particular time and lasts for a lengthy period.

There’s a big problem with the common measurement of the popular votes, since it disenfranchises the states which held a caucus. For example, Colorado (pop. 4.3 million) with 120,000 caucus voters, counts under the popular votes analysis for less than a third of the value of a much smaller state, Oklahoma (pop. 3.45 million) with its 417,000 primary voters. The weighted popular vote compensates for this.

So here are the results: by the WPV, Obama leads Clinton 110,761,104 to 98,744,197 (52.87% to 47.13%, a margin of 5.74 percentage points). By contrast, the current popular vote summary has Obama leading Clinton 51.38% to 48.62%, a margin of 2.76 percentage points (often reported as a 49-47 lead in most of the media). By the regular popular vote margin, Clinton would need to gain 720,000 votes to catch Obama. However, if we apply the WPV percentage margins to the number of current votes, Clinton would actually need to win by a margin of 1.49 million votes to equal Obama.

Read the rest of John's post here.

Comments

[teribeaugez]

Let's ask ourselves about our deep moral convictions regarding the DNC's rules that were purportedly violated by Florida and Michigan, which Howard Dean claims warranted the DNC's actions of stripping them of their representation. Florida and Michigan moved up their primaries, like numerous other states, states that weren't punished in the most drastic way possible, by stripping the voters in those states of their Constitutional rights to representation. Only Florida and Michigan had their representation at the convention stripped. And why? Do any of us actually care whether Florida, Michigan, California, South Carolina, New Hampshire or any of the other states' legislatures moved up their primaries? Does moving up the date of their primaries disenfranchise some minority segments of those states' populations? Did moving the dates create some barrier that would that make it more difficult for voters to vote, like historic injustices like applying literacy tests, or land ownership requirements, or any other historically egregious voting equity violations? No. No, there was nothing patently unfair, or even comprehensibly wrong with these states moving up their primaries. What IS unfair, unreasonable, and IMO unconstitutional is denying only these two states equal representation.