The Popular Vote At The End of the Day

At the end of the primary season it does seem that Obama still held a slight lead in the popular vote. I am using all of my numbers from www.realpolitics.com

Michigan will be excluded because the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee decided that the popular vote there will not count because they viewed it as a flawed primary since Edwards and Obama were not on the ballot according to a segment on MSNBC.

Obama: 17, 535, 458
Clinton: 17, 493, 836

Obama has a lead of 41,622

That number excludes Iowa, Maine, Nevada, and Washington. They did not release the popular vote from their caucuses. This is how RCP.com figured these estimations.

"Iowa, Nevada, Washington & Maine Have Not Released Popular Vote Totals. RealClearPolitics has estimated the popular vote totals for Senator Obama and Clinton in these four states. RCP uses the WA Caucus results from February 9 in this estimate because the Caucuses on February 9 were the “official” contest recognized by the DNC to determine delegates to the Democratic convention."

The estimation was based off of the percentage each candidate got in the caucus.

So using these estimations the popular vote stands as so.

Obama: 17, 869, 542
Clinton: 17, 717, 698

Obama has a lead of 151, 844

The only way she leads is if you count Michigan, however doing so is intellectually dishonest. It is assumed that a majority of the uncommitted vote would've gone to Obama if he were on the ballot. We do not know that exact number. At RCP if you add those four caucus states and give Obama the uncommitted vote then he still has a slight lead.

Besides whether you like it or not the popular vote doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in the Democratic nomination process since it is the delegates that matter. It doesn't matter in the general election since the president is selected by the electoral college. There were only four cases in our history where the winner of the popular vote did not become president.

I don't necessarily entirely agree with how the Democrats do their nomination process and I may not entirely agree with the electoral college. However at the end of the day it is delegates that mattered here. Obama got the number he needed. Also from the looks of it, he maintained a slight lead in the popular vote no matter how Clinton tried to spin it.

In a few days, or maybe weeks, we will all be focusing on the big match up. Barack Obama vs. John McCain.

An interesting note of trivia here. This election will give us the first sitting Congressman to become president since JFK.

For the most part on the issues both Obama and Clinton are largely similar. There are some differences. For example their stances on foreign policy. Clinton is more hawkish, Obama is not. I will do a blog later on the issues they share and disagree on so we can see how similar they are. For a Clinton supporter to call Obama a communist or vice versa, it is the pot calling the kettle black.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_vote_count.html