Here is why the POPULAR VOTE will not matter to the Super Delegates!!!!!!

KansasVoter

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue May-13-08 02:20 PM
Original message

Here is why the POPULAR VOTE will not matter to the Super Delegates!!!!!!

I am so sick of the "Popular Vote" talk I'll waste a post to make sure this is read again!!!

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When Hillary and Obama started this run for the Democratic nomination, the rules were clearly understood by all. Florida and Michigan would not count and the person who had 2025 delegates would win the nomination. Hillary knew this. Obama knew this. It should be as simple as that.

But that was when the Clinton political machine thought it would have this wrapped up after Super Tuesday. She had no plan after Super Tuesday because there was no possibility that anyone could beat Hillary Clinton. She was wrong.

Then the excuses started. Small states didn’t really matter, only large states (often called the ‘Insult 40 States Strategy’). Whomever has the most Electoral College delegates is how we should decide. Only primary states should count, not caucus states. Hillary’s camp talked about things that would have caused outrage from the party if Obama was behind and continually changing the way the outcome should be decided. The Clinton camp looks desperate with this twisted logic.

The one thing no one is really discussing is that Obama and his campaign director, David Plouffe, ran their campaign based on the DNC delegate count rules. If Plouffe thought the nomination would be based on popular vote, he would have devised a totally different type of campaign. If Plouffe thought that large states were the criteria for winning then the campaign would have focused on large states. If the DNC told Plouffe that only states holding primaries were considered in deciding the nomination, then he would have focused more on primary states.

But Obama and Plouffe knew the rules were that the nominee with 2025 delegates after the primary season wins the nomination. So they ran the campaign to win delegates. Not to win popular vote, not to win big states, not to only win primary states but to win the most delegates.

The Obama camp knew that you could afford to lose a big state by 5 points and at the same time win a small state by 30 points and they would net more delegates. For example, Hillary won New Jersey, with 107 available delegates and gained 11 more delegates and more popular votes than Obama. In the meantime, Obama, knowing that the race is based on total delegates and not popular vote, won in DC and Utah. Those two contests had a total of 38 available delegates. Obama ended up netting 13 more delegates than Hillary. So in those contests, Hillary came out with about 23,000 more popular votes but still lost 2 delegates to Obama. And there are many more examples like this.

And there are also congressional districts to contend with and Obama knew this. Winning big in a congressional district can give you a lot of delegates from that district but still not help you win the total popular vote in the rest of the state. So Obama knew targeting congressional districts would mean delegates.

And you don’t think Obama and Plouffe didn’t know Texas, with its dual primary/caucus system would favor Obama? Obama had a great and unbelievable ground team in place and the Obama camp knew it could organize Texas better than Clinton for the caucuses. So they knew losing the popular vote to Hillary would not matter when 1/3 of the delegates would come from the Texas caucuses. They ran the campaign in Texas to take advantage of the system. And Hillary’s camp was still “confused” by the Texas dual system as late as two weeks before the election.

Obama ran the campaign to win based on the rules of the game.

Remember, Obama still has the popular vote lead and even with Florida and Michigan he probably still would. But the only hope Hillary has now, because she cannot catch up based on delegates, is to keep the popular vote story out there.

If I was Plouffe I would be telling the DNC that if popular vote matters to the Super Delegates then lets do all of the primaries over again and let him run the campaign based on popular vote. This, of course, will not happen, but if it gets to Denver then Plouffe and Obama needs to sit down with the super delegates and explain why he ran the election to the ones not smart enough to know it already. The super delegates know Obama ran the campaign to win delegates. And that is what matters.

The super delegates role is to override the delegate count in extreme cases that I cannot even give an example of at this point. It is not to go to Denver and reexamine popular vote or Electoral College or big vs. small states or primaries vs. caucuses. Once again, how can anyone go into Denver when Obama has the delegate count lead and take the nomination away from him? Especially when he has motivated millions of new voters and raised more money than any campaign in history? Believe me, the people who think that the super delegates are that stupid or that Hillary is that powerful are wrong!

Imagine a football coach telling the referee with 5 minutes left in the game, that instead of using the score lets base the game on total yards gained. Or a baseball coach in the bottom on the 9th inning, telling the umpire that the game should be decided based on total hits and not runs. Do you think those coaches would have had a different game strategy if they knew that total yards and number of hits mattered more than score? Of course they would. Hillary arguing for popular votes is just as ridiculous. The rules were in place and Hillary knew them. The only reason to change them at this point is so Hillary can win the game.