Why the Popular Vote Argument Has Disappeared

Two weeks ago, I examined the officially meaningless but symbolically crucial popular-vote tally on the Democratic side.

At the time, Hillary Clinton had just won Pennsylvania by nine points and was claiming to be the popular-vote leader, positioning herself – in theory—to assert a moral claim on the loyalties of uncommitted superdelegates.

But the claim was based on some highly selective math—counting, for instance, Michigan (where Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot) but not four caucus states where hundreds of thousands of Democrats participated but no official popular vote tally was kept—and I concluded that “under the most basic and probably the fairest criteria … Obama will finish the primary season hundreds of thousands of votes ahead of Clinton.”

That now looks all the more certain, not only because of Tuesday’s results from North Carolina and Indiana but also because some other widely accepted assumptions about turnout in the final Democratic contests may turn out to be wildly off-base.

In fact, as I re-compute the numbers now, Obama’s final popular-vote advantage will be, even under some worst-case assumptions for him, so large that he’ll still be ahead even if the results from Florida’s outlaw January primary are included. This is highly significant, since Clinton has justified pressing ahead with her candidacy in large part by tying herself to Florida’s (and Michigan’s) status. As some analyses have correctly pointed out, if Obama were to announce that he’s willing to abide by Florida’s January verdict, it would deflate much of the rationale for Clinton’s lingering presence.

More interestingly, Obama can also afford to count the far less legitimate results from Michigan, granting Clinton the 300,000-plus votes that she won with Obama’s name missing from the ballot—as long as he is credited with the votes that “uncommitted” received that day, a rather conservative approximation of Obama’s actual level of support among Democrats there. (Even without the uncommitted votes, Obama’s overall popular-vote lead will still probably survive Michigan’s inclusion, unless every worst-case scenario for him over the final six contests is realized.)

In short, Obama is quickly reaching the point where he can afford to make a concession on the Florida and Michigan vote that will be as inconsequential as it is magnanimous.

My original popular vote forecast—which stemmed from projections of the final eight Democratic primaries—credited Obama with a 156,000-vote combined plurality from Indiana and North Carolina. That was based on a somewhat conservative estimate of his support in both states. (I had him winning North Carolina by 12 and losing Indiana by six, but he actually won Carolina by 14 and lost Indiana by just two.) So his net popular-vote gain on the day was actually around 210,000. That’s no small difference with so few contests remaining.

The other major factor is a reconsideration of turnout in Puerto Rico, where Clinton is favored to win handily and which is roughly the same size as Oregon and Kentucky, the two largest states left on the docket. So Puerto Rico, depending on its turnout, can really skew any popular-vote forecast.

But scant attention has been paid to Puerto Rico and most analysts seem to have simply accepted the nice round estimate that 1,000,000 residents will participate in the June 1 Democratic primary.

The estimable election expert Michael Barone, in his much-discussed analysis of the popular-vote possibilities, attributed this forecast to the fact that “turnout in Puerto Rican elections is, as a percentage of those eligible, higher than anywhere on the Mainland, something on the order of 80 percent as compared with 61 percent in the 2004 presidential general election.”

But that fact might not have much bearing on this year’s primary vote. Manuel Alvarez-Rivera, an expert on Puerto Rican politics, told me that for several reasons “the estimate of one million voters for the upcoming June 1st primary is way too high.” He suggested a more reasonable turnout figure of 600,000, “give or take 100,000.”

With this in mind, I decided to run the numbers again, projecting the remaining six contests, with turnout estimates based on conversations with knowledgeable observers in each state. Here’s what I came up with:

West Virginia (May 13)<

Turnout estimate: 475,000

Rationale: The primary is open to Democrats and, for the first time, independents. But, as in California, independents must specifically request a Democratic ballot at the polls; if they don’t, they are instead handed a nonpartisan ballot that doesn’t include the presidential race. There is a gubernatorial election this year, but there is only one candidate for the G.O.P. nomination, so the Republican ballot shouldn’t be a major draw for independents. This should be a Clinton state, so let’s give her a monster victory:

Clinton: 65% (308,750)

Obama: 35% (166,250) Next Page >