GREAT ARGUMENTS AS TO WHY THE POPULAR VOTE IS NOT AS RELEVANT

as some insist it is.



This is from daily Kos' PocketNines, and makes great sense:



"Point Number 1: If the popular vote determined the nominee, no candidate would ever go to Iowa or New Hampshire. They'd spend all their time in big urban areas all over the country from the outset of the campaign, racking up raw numbers. <...> Concrete Example: Barack Obama would not have spent only a day and a half in California before the Feb 5 primary. He would have never gone to Idaho. Duh."


Point Number 2: If the popular vote determined the nominee, no state in its right mind would ever hold a caucus, instantly disenfranchising itself. Concrete example: Minnesota-Missouri. Minnesota gets credit for 214K votes, and Missouri gets 822K votes, but they each get 72 delegates. Is Missouri's voice 4 times more important than Minnesota's?


Point Number 3: The arbitrary distinction between who gets to vote in these primaries is nothing like the general election, where everyone registered gets to vote. In the primaries, sometimes it's just Dems, sometimes Dems and Indies, sometimes anyone. Concrete example: Texas gets a million more votes than similar overall population New York (2.8M to 1.8M), even though New York is far more Democratic, simply due to this arbitrary restriction on who can vote (NY = closed, Texas = open)."

It's not relevant AT ALL. If the popular vote were the metric used to determine the nominee then Obama's campaign would have looked completely different. That's why you don't change the rules in the middle of the game, when you're losing. It's not fair to the person who played by the rules and won.

That is the only purpose of votes, according to the DNC Rulebook.

Read Clause 13.A. entitled "Fair Reflection of Presidential Preferences" in the rules.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/apache.3cdn.net/de68e7b6dfa0743217_hwm6bhyc4.pdf

:hi:

Yeah, I think I did.

No wonder I so seldom post here anymore. The wierd really HAVE gone pro.

--p!
Or maybe I've just gone wierd. Either way ...

If she even finishes ahead in the popular vote, of course.

outrage because Gore won the popular vote. We were all wrong,
Gore did not win after all??????

This pertains to the PRIMARIES, which have different dynamics than the GE, including caucuses, open and closed primaries and delegates, that change the way the candidates campaign and the turnout varies due to format. And although you are talking apples and oranges, NO, the popular vote does not determine the Presidency, the Electoral College does. What was wrong about the 2000 election, was that Florida screwed up and awarded their EV's to Bush, because the re-count was halted wrongly. So, the fact that Gore won the nation's popular vote means squat, unfortunately.

The outrage wasn't so much over the popular vote as it was the games being played during the count, the disenfranchisement of voters for improper reasons and by a company who never even checked its list for errors, and there were errors, and the comment by a Supreme Court justice that they had to stop the count or it would do irreparable harm to Bush. It was a stolen election and the theft had nothing to do with the popular vote. Gore would have won under the rules if one side hadn't cheated and got away with it.

You change the rules between elections if you're going to do it at all, and there might be merit to the idea of adjusting the system some. But we all knew the rules before the race started and we all planned our strats and finances to win under those rules. If "ready on day one" wasn't actually ready it's just sour grapes to try to change the standards mid race. She knew the rules as well as anyone, claimed to at least.

I agree with the proportional representation during the primary, so that we
don't get "tyranny of the majority" when it comes to our nominee (and, as
noted above, it allows all states to have some say, as opposed to just focusing
on the large states, as takes place in the general).

Do we really need SDs, though? Isn't there some way to just use proportional
representation to determine our nominee, but avoid this "elitist" aspect of
the process? I know there were political considerations at issue when the
proportional/SD system was established, but are both really necessary? (Would
one not "work" without the other?)

nominate another McGovern.

bugged the DNC headquarters. It wasn't that McGovern wasn't
necessarily a good candidate; it was that the other side was
proven to have CHEATED ...

Driving up the votes there might help offset some of her advantages in bigger states.

and they are eating it up. Oh, she's leading in votes, she should be the nominee! And did we mention that she raised 10 million dollars since PA?

unless they're rational.