Interesting article by Andrew Romano of Newsweek, The Popular Vote Fallacy Clinton supporters, Jon Corzine and John Murtha, separately stated that Clinton would need to win “the popular vote” in order to make a viable case to the superdelegates to choose her over Obama. Romano, makes the case that there is no way to determine the popular vote during the primaries.
But while most media types treated Corzine and Murtha’s mirror-image remarks as evidence of an exit strategy, they failed to acknowledge the fallacious assumption underlying the whole discussion: that there’s even a popular vote for Clinton or Obama to win.
Sadly, there’s not.
…
The fact is, the Democratic Party has only one mechanism in place for deciding the nomination: delegates. The system is simply not equipped to produce an accurate tally of popular votes.
Filed under: Florida and Michigan delegates, politics | Tagged: Barack Obama, election '08, Hillary Clinton, popular vote, primary
