What makes you a tool? Talking about "delegate math."

Austinitis

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Wed Apr-23-08 05:13 PM
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What makes you a tool? Talking about "delegate math."

What makes you a tool? Talking about "delegate math."

So let's touch on an argument which came up after Ohio and Texas and seems (for whatever reason) to be getting a lot of play http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/4/23/54624/9063/994/501398">once again. It usually goes something like this:

Hillary's wins in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, while embarrassing for Obama, don't actually change the likely outcome of the election. During February Obama was able to acquire a substantial lead in pledged delegates and, because the Democratic primaries grant delegates proportionally, Hillary won't be able to overcome that advantage. Since Obama will have the lead in pledged delegates, super-delegates will feel obligated (both by moral and by political reasons) to respect the popular will and support Obama.

The argument here assumes a link between a lead in pledged-delegates and an eventual rally of super-delegates (without which, neither candidate can win the nomination). The link is made plausible with a pair of claims:

Super-delegates are politicians and are unlikely to buck the popular will. Popular support is demonstrated by a lead in pledged delegates.

A lead in pledged delegates bolsters claims of electablity, and super delegates want to support the candidate who can win in the general election.

Sadly for the people who actually buy into this, none of this reasoning holds up to much scrutiny. While the super-delegates may indeed feel obligated to ratify the will of the people, it's unlikely that the pledged-delegate count could endure any sort of serious media scrutiny and retain its status as an indicator of popular will in the public imagination. And since the pledged-delegate count is the only significant metric on which Obama maintains an insurmountable lead (after last night, the popular vote is http://www.realclearpolitics.com/horseraceblog/chooseyourown.html">within easy reach of the Hillary campaign), the idea that Obama's frontrunner status is unassailable simply falls flat.

Here's a quick taste of what the pledged-delegate count will be attacked with:

The Pledged Delegate System Is Undemocratic:

The pledged-delegate system can give more delegates to the candidate that loses a state. In both Texas and Nevada, Hillary won the popular vote yet Barak Obama walked away with the majority of the delegates. You don't have democracy if the votes don't determine who wins.

Moreover, in Iowa the pledged-delegate system allowed Obama to take over some of Edwards' support without any follow-up election to confirm that Edwards supporters would all take Obama as their second choice (obviously they wouldn't all do that, so Obama stole at least some pledged delegates there.)

The pledged-delegate system violates the principle of one-person one vote. Among the most egregious examples of this, on the pledged delegate system a voter in Wyoming has more than sixteen times the influence that a voter in California has. Voters in Alaska are given almost seventeen times the influence of voters in New Jersey. Voters in here Texas get negative influence, because the pledged delegates from our state go the the guy we voted against. See the chart below to get an idea of how many people from your state have to fight with each other for the same voice as one person from Wyoming:

(The popular vote count can be found http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_vote_count.html">here and the delegate distribution can be found http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_delegate_count.html">here. Note that I've done Ia, Me, Nv, and Wa as one state, because turnout estimates are only available for all four together.)

The Pledged-Delegate System is Racist. Even within states, pledged delegates, in violation of one-person-one-vote, are assigned to geographic areas based upon the rates at which those areas voted for Democrats in past elections. Moreover, since minority populations can cluster in geographic regions, members of a minority community can be given a disproportionately small voice in the nominating contest. This, in fact, happened here in Texas, where the largely Hispanic Rio Grande valley was given a smaller distribution of delegates than its population size merited.

Moreover, in the same way that the racial biases and ingrained in the pledged-delegate system, geographical and economic biases are built in as well. All of these biases are undemocratic and all of them violate the principle of one-person one-vote.

Obama's delegate lead is entirely the product of counter-democratic biases in the pledged delegate system:

While it might seem that any oddities in the pledged delegate system have an irrelevant impact over the course of a whole nomination race, the chart below shows that, in fact, the vast majority of Obama's delegate lead is the product of states that either a) give hugely disproportionate weight to their voters over voters in other states, or b) hand delegates to the candidates in ways which are deeply inconsistent with the proportion of the vote won in that state, or c) do both (like Iowa).

What the chart above displays is that, out of Obama's 152 delegate lead, all but 14 delegates were picked up in states that have strong anti-democratic biases in their system of delegate distribution. And let me stress that the chart above only shows the delegates Obama picked up over and above delegates picked up from those states by Hillary.

The point, then, is that if you corrected for the anti-democratic biases strewn throughout the pledged-delegate system (both within states and between states), Obama's lead would be well within a range than Hillary could conceivably overcome. And once you do the math; once you see how Byzantine, undemocratic, and simply fucked up the pledged-delegate system is, it becomes really quite hard to justify any claim to the effect that super-delegates are bound (or likely) to respect any candidate's pledged-delegate lead.

The Popular Vote Avoids These Problems:

Now, I'll be the first to admit that there are problems with the popular vote (primarily involving what votes ought to be counted). But even the wildest and least plausible method for counting the popular vote is vastly more democratic than the pledged-delegate system. Bluntly, the pledged-delegate system is about as fucked up as any system purporting to reflect a popular mandate could really get.

For example, if you're a voter in California, your vote is vastly more diluted just in virtue of Minnesota's unmerited influence on the pledged-delegate system than it would be by the inclusion of Michigan on the popular vote. (Minnesota's caucus awarded one delegate to Obama for every 2,960 votes won by Obama, to a total of 48 delegates for Obama. Clinton picked up 204 delegates in California for a total of 2,608,184. That's a ratio of 12,785 Clinton votes to Clinton delegates. You could give the voters in the two states equal influence by adding Minnesota 9,825 voters for every Minnesota delegate. That would require adding 471,600 voters to the total number of voters. Counting Michigan in the popular vote would only mean adding 328,309.)

Moreover, the popular vote avoids problems of unevenly distributing influence, giving the win the the guy who got voted down, and undervaluing some minority communities.

"Delegate Math" is a Farce

Thus, if the race comes to a point where Hillary controls the popular vote and Obama leads in pledged-delegates, the Hillary camp is going to contest the use of pledged-delegates in the media and there's no way they're going to lose. The pledged-delegate system is so hugely undemocratic that awarding the nomination on the basis of it to the loser of the popular vote would create the sorts of "stolen-election" perceptions that could engender a backlash from Hillary supporters.

And that's what makes this "delegate-math" argument such a farce. Because while Obama may very well end up with both the lead in pledged-delegates and the nomination, who won't have the latter because of the former. He'll have the nomination because he held onto his popular vote lead. Nothing else in this race matters (barring bear attacks, kiddy-porn dungeon discoveries, and the like).