Quote:
Originally Posted by catalinacat
Obama Won On Points
Thus, Obama has won the Democratic nomination not because his voting coalition is larger than Clinton's. As best we can tell, they are of equal size. Instead, Obama has won because his coalition is more efficient at producing delegates than Clinton's coalition. Obama's relatively narrow vote lead has produced a relatively wide pledged delegate lead, which has in turn produced an even wider lead in superdelegates. The following chart indicates this point by measuring the number of votes per pledged delegate. The idea here is that, the lower the number of votes per pledged delegate, the more delegates a single vote produces for the candidate, and therefore the more efficient a candidate's coalition is.
As we can see - Obama's voters are worth more delegates. Put precisely, there are 10,237 voters for every Obama pledged delegate and 10,807 voters for every Clinton pledged delegate. That's a difference in Obama's favor of 570 voters per delegate. That might not seem like it would make a big difference, but it most certainly has. If the "votes per pledged delegate" metric were equal for Clinton and Obama - Obama's pledged delegate lead would drop from 106 to 12.
[Note that the popular vote used in the above chart does not include the Michigan vote while the delegate counts do include the Michigan delegates. This was done to account for the fact that the Rules and Bylaws Committee did not use the Michigan vote to estimate the delegate allocation. If we were to include the Michigan vote by allocating to Obama the uncommitted, Obama's voters actually become more efficient.]
Does any of this mean that Clinton, not Obama, "should" be the nominee? No. By our imperfect metrics for measuring the opinions of the public, we must conclude that there is no clear public choice......."
".....This was a highly intelligent strategy, but it was not a grand feat of majority building. Obama supporters need to recognize that their candidate won not because "the people had their say," but because his campaign out-smarted her campaign. Accordingly, they need to respect the candidate whom they could not beat in a straight-up fight for votes.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/hor...bamas_tko.html
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Isn't this due to the caucus states which he swept through? I believe at caucuses each person's vote was worth much more than during a primary due to lower turnouts on both sides.
Obama's ground campaign was much more organized (and by much more organized I mean that Clinton essentially ignored caucus states) thus he got more DPV (delegates per vote, aren't I clever?) in caucuses. He didn't cheat or do anything wrong, he just played the game better.
I don't see what your point is. It's nothing that we didn't already know. As for the popular vote argument, it's not useable because we don't know how many people would have voted for him or any other candidates in Michigan, and caucus states don't record their turnouts.