Many DNC insiders fear that if Hillary Clinton manages to lose the pledged delegates, she may still take the lead in the popular vote, thereby causing the superdelegates to make a hard decision as to which candidate they should choose come August. Their fears are rooted in the notion that Clinton is only behind by roughly 800,000 votes, and that she could feasibly catch up with a big win in Pennsylvania.
They'd be wrong.
In fact, Obama leads in the popular vote by anywhere between 2 million to 3 million voters. How is this possible? The reason lies in the ever elusive math of the Democratic caucus.
When voters everywhere were watching the returns of, say, Kansas on Super Tuesday, most of them naturally assumed that Barack Obama won 27,172 votes to Hillary Clinton's 9,462. But those aren't voters they're counting, they're really just more delegates. County delegates. The county delegates represent an undefined amount of peoples' votes, depending on how many people arrive to the caucus and how many county delegates are assigned. This number could be anywhere from 5 to 100 people and beyond.
Since there is no exact number of how many votes are actually represented in a caucus, let's just round it out to 20 voters per delegate, out of morbid curiosity. That means each delegate, on average, represents about 20 people, and we will multiply the final tally by 20.
Therefore, in Kansas, Barack Obama gained 543,440 votes to Hillary Clinton's 189,240 votes. This is a far wider margin of victory than Clinton supporters would like to admit, but decidedly more accurate.
But let's just say, for arguments sake, that we're overestimating how many people a county delegate represents. Let's call it 10 rather than 20. Then the tally becomes 271,720 votes for Obama, and 94,620 for Clinton. Still a substantial victory. And that is the absolute rock bottom lowest average estimate.
More at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shawn-christensen/dont-be-fooled-obama-is-a_b_96118.html