So Who Do the DEMOCRATS Want for a Nominee?
by campskunk, Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 07:19:06 PM EDT
Last month there were two interesting tabulations of the results so far in the primaries. We have seen all the tabulations of the popular vote and the arguments about who's ahead, but these two were different. They counted the DEMOCRATIC vote. That's right- the votes by actual, card-carrying Democrats in Democratic primaries.
Of course, you can't measure this directly, and that's for a reason. Every vote in the ballot box is the same. The only way to do this is indirectly, using exit polls. If you know the percent of voters who identified themselves as Democrats in exit polls, and the percentage of Democrats who voted for each candidate (again using exit poll data), you can take the recorded vote totals and figure out how many Democrats in each state voted for each candidate.
Is this pure science? Oh, hell, no. You're extrapolating from a sample of a few hundred to millions of voters. But it's way ahead of the anecdotal evidence we have that "those people in Mississippi who voted for Hillary were really Republicans" and "I heard that Obama got a bunch of Independents to vote for him". At least it's real numbers... probably the best available data to answer the burning question, "Who do the DEMOCRATS want for the Democratic nominee? We know who the Republicans want- somebody who will lose to McCain.
Onward to the numbers.
Let's do a fast example. Say in State X, the vote totals were Obama 1,500,000 and Hillary 1,000,000. Obama won the primary, 60% to 40%. Now, suppose the exit polls said that only 60% of the voters self-identified as Democrats (in the vote total, that would be 1,500,000 of the 2,500,000 total votes), and of those Democrats in the exit polling, they favored Hillary 8 to 7 (53.3% to 46.7%). That means that Hillary got 800,000 of the 1,500,000 Democratic votes, and Obama got 700,000. Obama won the open primary by 500,000 votes (since the 1,000,000 non-Democrats went for him, 800,000 to 200,000, or 4 to 1), but lost the Democratic vote by 100,000 votes See how it works?
Last month there were two efforts to take the primaries so far, and all the exit poll data, and calculate who was ahead in the Democratic vote. One was from Cal Lanier over at The Perfect World, and can be found here. The Slate Trailhead blog had a mention of this, which is how I found it. Paul Lukasiak had a similar analysis up on Taylor Marsh's site here
(cootie alert for Obama supporters).
Updating the totals since February by looking at TX, OH, VT, and RI, and even including Mississippi, Cal Lanier has the primary total as Hillary 10,210,076 Obama 9,133,765. Even throwing in the Democratic vote counts from caucus states, which aren't technically votes, but might as well count, since it's one Democrat's opinion, that adds another 378,613 for Hillary and 683,111 for Obama, so Obama ends up losing the total Democratic vote by 771,813 votes.
Bottom Line? Here are the total votes cast by DEMOCRATS so far...
Hillary 10,588,689, Obama 9,816,876
And people wonder why she's fighting for the nomination. Probably because more Democrats want her to get the nomination that want Obama to get it. I know, it's a silly thing, this majority opinion by actual party members, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
OK, you can all screech away and attack the methodology, now that you've decided you don't like the results. And remember RULE ZERO, as lambert over at Corrente says:
Rule Zero: Any rule that purports to impede Obama's selection as Democratic nominee is not really a rule.
Tags: 2008 election, Primaries (all tags)
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