And in case Wilentz wasn’t paying attention, a winner-take-all system is far more undemocratic than proportional representation or caucuses. Since, you know, you’re ignoring the will of at least a third - and usually almost half - of the voters.

it’s called the 50 state strategy, I recommend you read about it.

your “strategy” –the one where dems don’t even try in states they just “know” they won’t win, has been losing national elections for us for years.

“it cannot be stated enough that few if any, of these states will contribute to the Democratic electoral college column. ”

and with that attitude, they never will.

Just the reality of the situation…Democrats don’t spend the time, energy, money politicking in states that they are unlikely to win…that’s simply the reality of it. Perhaps being a distant cousin of Dick Cheney will allow Obama to carry Wyoming…yeah…sure

Joe @ 24

plus…virtually certain hrc would lose OH and Mich in a GE…what with selling her soul to the devil of union-busting and free trade backstabbing.

I don’t know about MI but I do recall seeing OH polls at Survey USA showing Obama losing to McCain in a rather large way and Clinton leading McCain. Methinks you are too invested in your own narrative to figure out that things aren’t exactly as you would like to believe…

Whether Obama is ahead in votes is useful only if you have presupposed which votes to count…a rather prescient reminder of the 2000 election.

If you count the votes in MI and FL, then not so much because Clinton is now about even. Yeah, I’m sure that you’re going to say, well we can’t count MI because Obama’s name wasn’t on the ballot (of course ignoring that he took his own name off the ballot) and FL shouldn’t count because neither candidate could officially campaign in FL.

The point is that your argument only holds water if you then take the position that even though record numbers of voters participated in the FL and MI primaries, you aren’t willing to count them.

Indeed Obama is ahead in the pledged delegate counts and it seems unlikely that Clinton will surpass Obama on pleged delegates even after all voting is done but it’s possible for her to do so. That said, it’s obvious that neither candidate will reach the 2025 number of delegates through the rest of the primary and thus the rules are clear that the convention is where this will be decided and it may very well be brokered.

Rather than match your sarcasm with more sarcasm, I think you are conveniently trying to ignore the fact that there are many ways to analyze the voting so far and that some of the analysis methods might actually make an argument of Clinton over Obama and some clearly will not. But the argument has to be made, for the betterment of the party and in deference to the fact that at this point, when you count all of the votes tallied (no matter how hard Obama surrogates want to deny that FL and MI actually voted), that less than 50% of these votes so far have gone for Obama and more than 48% have gone for Clinton AND that after the balance of votes occur, it’s entirely probably that Clinton will have surpassed Obama and by some margin.

The election thus far is much closer than most Obama supporters are willing to admit.

You know the war I voted for, only I didn’t really mean it because I couldn’t imagine that Cheney and Bush would ever mislead us.

That argument.

Yeah, that will work …

The flip side of that argument is that sometimes the devil you don’t know might be better than the one you do. We have a good idea of what Hillary will be like on issues like NAFTA, union rights, drug policy, gay rights and other progressive matters, because we saw first hand how her husband, quite frankly, sold out progressives on those and other issues, and how she herself has done a piss poor job of working on those goals since entering the Senate. Maybe Obama will be as bad or worse, but so far, I haven’t seen any compelling reason to think that other than the insistence of Clinton supporters on the matter.

Everything I’ve seen of Hillary Clinton since beginning her Senate career paints her as a slightly left-of-center, DLC moderate who has an unhealthy fixation on political triangulation (a term that I had never heard applied to politics until Bill Clinton became president). I will vote for Hillary if she gets the nomination, but I am not looking forward to being told that, on a host of progressive issues, I should just shut up and accept the DLC agenda lest we somehow embolden the Republicans, even as the DLC approach to politics hands the Republicans victory after victory.

and with that attitude, they never will.

If Clinton were running in the Republican nomination race she would be ahead now.

Thanks - but if I wanted Republican values determining the nomination process I wouldn’t be a Democrat.

Rasmussen Reports has an article by Wesley Little that breaks the numbers down very cleanly.

There is a serious inequity in the delegate breakdowns…
for example, in Kansas…Obama received 23 delegates from 27,172 delegates making it 1,181 ‘votes’ per delegate received whereas in New York, Hillary received 139 delegates from 1,003,623 votes making it an average of 7,220 ‘votes’ per delegate received.

The inequity of the system entirely disfavors the populous states and especially the states like NY, CA, NJ, IL, PA, OH where democrats traditionally do well.

In addition, some simple arithmetic tells me that the ‘weighting’ for these states also has a thumb on the scale…

Kansas…
435 districts / 4 House seats * 41 delegates = 4,458.75
New York
435 districts / 29 House seats * 281 delegates = 4,215.00

So not only does it take a hell of a lot less votes to get a delegate in some of these small (and typically red) states, they actually skew to a higher relative value.

Now obviously the rules that are in place this cycle aren’t going to change but some consideration has to be given to this quirky methodology.

While all props must be given to Obama for securing a lot of these red state delegates, it cannot be stated enough that few if any, of these states will contribute to the Democratic electoral college column. Even worse, the delegates from these states are not at all indicative of Obama’s ability to succeed in the general election, especially the ‘battleground’ states.

The narrative that Hillary and her campaign staff is making to ’super’ delegates is quite understandable…that Obama can’t win the general election, thus, they should vote for her. While none of the above, nor the original link provided by Susie makes it all clear, it is clearly part of the calculation why Obama isn’t really leading as much as he wishes everyone to think.

THere is a righty blog (Hug Hewitt) that was an unabashed Romney supporter. It turned off many many regulars until Romney lost and the blog returned to normal. I am afraid that is what is hapening here.

We should also keep in mind that both candidates would have run completely different campaigns if it were winner-take-all. Obama would not have invested any energy in narrowing her margin in New York, and he probably would have written off New Jersey and Massachusetts entirely too. He would have spent more time in California and focused on either Ohio or Texas instead of both.

Call me oversensitive (I am a union lawyer, so maybe I am), but this is the sort of right wing talking point that Clinton seems to resort to too quickly. From my short stint as a labor lawyer in Arkansas in the 1980s I can tell you that neither Bill nor Hillary has every had a warm spot in their hearts for unions or workers. We never thought of the Rose firm as anything other than a white shoe union-busting firm and her time on the Wal-Mart board was not exactly a profile in courage.

I remember reading the same thing back in 1964, as applied to the Republican Party, which had not won a deep southern state for decades. That, of course, was the year that Goldwater won all of them.

I think Dean’s fifty state strategy makes more sense: after all, how do you expect to ever contend there if you write them off ahead of time? And when would you know whether to allow a red state back in?

And while it may seem to some to be unfair for Clinton to be lagging because of caucuses and primaries in red states, she chose a blockbuster strategy, based on a conclusive win on Super Tuesday that just didn’t happen. It’s not as if the rules changed while the election was underway; the Clinton campaign just didn’t think they needed to worry about the details, like caucuses in Nevada, until they saw the poll numbers looking bad for them.

One hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. “Just the thing to quench my thirst,” quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: “I am sure they are sour.”

It is easy to despise what you cannot get.

Brendan - if money grew on trees, we’d all have plenty of money but unfortunately it would be devalued so much and therefore we would not be rich. That is a lesson for you from Econ 101.

no, the primary system isn’t democratic. both primaries and caucuses are really about rewarding party activists (making them delegates, rewarding precinct captains for turning out democratic votes in prior elections, etc) than about just voting for the parties’ choice.

the weird thing is that wilentz isn’t advocating a democratic alternative. a democratic alternative would be to simply vote and give whoever gets the most votes the nomination. instead, wilentz is advocating a different non-democratic alternative, the same system that the republicans use to choose their nominee and the country uses to choose its president in the general election. those aren’t strictly democratic either. if you’re talking a purely popular vote, the outcome still favors obama, not clinton. he’s ahead in the popular vote and it is highly unlikely that clinton will be able to catch up.

Not only that, but there’s a big difference between a primary WITHIN a party and a general BETWEEN parties. The comparison is apples to oranges from the get-go. Not to mention, as the Clinton camp has made the point a zillion times, that there is no necessary relationship between a candidate winning a primary 55-45 and their ability to win the same state in the general election. So what is the point again for Wilentz? Beyond living in the dubious zone?

Such as ‘who has the most votes,’ ‘who has won the most states,’ ‘who has won the most pledged delegates…’

the electoral college system sucks, so does the existing primary system for allocating delegates. if you make the system more like the electoral college, it would still suck, just like the electoral college sucks already.