The Popular Vote: Obama or Hillary?

Back to that question of who has more of the popular vote, Obama or Hillary: Realclearpolitics, has the following table:

Popular Vote

The top heading "Popular Vote Total" is the popular vote excluding Michigan. The third and fourth lines include Michigan, unmodified. The fifth and sixth lines include Michigan, but with 100% of the Uncommitted vote going to Obama.

The second, fourth, and sixth lines include estimates of the popular votes in the caucus states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington.

But as Talkleft points out, there is still another wrinkle to the definition of "popular vote": states which have both caucuses and primaries, where the caucus determines who gets the delegates, but the primary has more voters expressing a preference for a candidate. Nebraska, Idaho, and Washington both had primaries as well as caucuses. It seems reasonable to include them if we are measuring popular votes cast either literally or to see which candidate has more support among voters.

Including them helps Hillary and hurts Obama. I use numbers from Talkleft.

Nebraska had a primary in May, as well as its earlier caucuses which actually chose the delegates (see here for a news story).

Nebraska had 38 thousand caucus votes and 95 thousand votes in its May primary. In the caucuses, Obama beat Hillary 68% to 32%, 26 to 12 thousand, a 14 thousand margin. In the primary, Obama beat Hillary 49.4% to 46.6%, 47 to 44, a 3 thousand margin. Replacing caucus with primary results adds 11 thousand to Hillary's total popular vote.

Washington had 238 thousand caucus votes and 691 thousand votes in its February primary (on which, see here). In the caucuses, Obama beat Hillary 67% to 31%, 159 to 74 thousand, an 85 thousand margin. In the primary, Obama beat Hillary 51% to 45%, 352 to 311 thousand, a 41 thousand margin. Replacing caucus with primary results adds 44 thousand to Hillary's total popular vote.

In Idaho, Obama had a 13 thousand vote lead in the caucuses, but only 8 thousand in the primary. Replacing the Washington and Nebraska and Idaho caucus results with primary results thus helps Hillary by 60 thousand votes. The spreads in RealClearPolitics's 6 categories change to Clinton +36 thousand
Obama +74
Clinton +363
Clinton +2538
Clinton +125
Clinton +16

Thus, the only definition of these, once Nebraska and Washington popular votes are included, by which Obama wins is if we exclude the Michigan primary and include estimates from the 4 caucus states.

Of course, all of these vote totals are very close, as are the delegate totals. Their main importance in my opinion is as a gauge of how much each candidate appeals to voters, and really we should weight the later primaries more heavily in measuring that. For someone who believes in "count every vote", though, the popular vote is crucial, more important perhaps than the vote allocated by the rules.

Speaking of the rules, the Democratic National Committee ruling today puzzles me. It seems blatantly illegal. The DNC has said that delegates from Michigan and Florida will only get 1/2 vote each. That's fine--- those states broke the rules. But it is also allocating the Uncommitted vote in Michigan to Obama, giving him the delegates based on that. Since the voters voted for Uncommitted, not Obama, how can those delegates possibly be committed to vote for Obama? The same result could have been achieved by picking allowing the Obama camp to pick the delegates but leaving them formally uncommitted, but why wasn't that done? Or *is* that how it was done?

Obama's Church

Obama's church is worse than even the negative publicity had led me to expect in its anti-Americanism and radical politics. See Stanley Kurtz's excerpts from the church magazine.

Hilary Clinton Is Winning the Popular Vote

Michael Barone has good posts here and post-Penn about Clinton's popular vote chances. But I think he does it wrong.

Since the popular vote competition is informal, each side will pick its own rules. Mrs. Clinton has said that MIchigan and Florida should count. Florida gives her 288 thousand and Michigan gives her a 90 thousand margin over Uncommitted, though she will point out that it gives her 328 thousand more people than voted for Obama, who wasn't on the ballot. That's 616 thousand from those two states,using Clinton-supporter math.

RealClearPolitics gave Obama a lead of 827 thousand before Pennsylvania. Subtract the 106 thousand that's just attributed to Obama from caucus states but are not actual votes, to get 721 thousand. Subtract Florida and Michigan to get 105 thousand. Now subtract Clinton's 205 thousand margin from Pennsylvania, and she's ahead nationally by 100,000 votes. She doesn't need Porto Rico any more to claim victory.

Which rules to use is debatable. It being debatable is a good argument for judging winners by pre-set rules rather than ex post judgements. Many Democrats prefer ex post judgements, both as a matter of political style (that applies to judicial decisionmaking too) and because they argued for it in the Gore-Florida situation in 2000. Furthermore, in that election they argued for the most expansive rules possible, to count the most people who came to the polls and tried to vote (though as I recall-- I might be wrong-- nobody realized at the time that if the Democrat definition had been adopted, Bush would have won). Here, a primitive one-man one-vote theory would say that Clinton is ahead, because Obama really didn't get any votes in Michigan. To get round that, you'd have to resort to a theory that what should count is who people would have voted for if their candidate had been on the ballot, and that is perilously close to a theory of how people would have voted if Obama had been as much the favorite in January as he is now.

I think these popular-vote calculations shouldn't matter and it would be fine for the superdelegates to ignore them. But then I thought it was fine to follow the pre-set rules in Florida 2000 too. The Democrats think differently, so they have a big problem-- and it is a problem not unrelated to their political philosophy, so we shouldn't feel it's unfair that they have it.

The Obama Tax Returns

Mr. Obama's tax returns are here. 2000-2004 he and his wife earned about 250,000 dollars per year and gave about 2,500 dollars to charity. In 2005 and 2006 they went up to 1.6M and 1M in income (his book came out and earned a lot), and raised their donations too. When Mr. Obama became senator, the U. of C. created a high-paying administrative job for Mrs. Obama, another reason for the increase in income.

The oddest thing about the returns is the lack of capital income before the big pay increase in 2005. Did their savings all go into tax-exempt vehicles such as life insurance, pension plans, etc.? Or did they not save anything?

In three of the years, even interest from a bank account isn't included. They probably had it, but were sloppy and didn't report it. That isn't a significant violation of tax law either legally or ethically, but it indicates remarkable sloppiness. They must have been filling out their own taxes (a sensible thing to do) rather than hiring someone, but a lawyer-administrator couple ought to notice details, especially when the lawyer is in politics.

2000. Interest 38. Dividends 0.
2001. Interest 0. Dividends 0.
2002. Interest 33. Dividends 0.
2003. Interest 0. Dividends 0.
2004. Interest 0. Dividends 0.
2005. Interest 13,385. Dividends 2,754. From two banks. I think one bank was investing in stocks for him.
2006. Interest 4,590. Dividends 1,188. Capital loss taken 3000 (10,136 total loss, Nuveen floating rate PDF SHS).

The TaxProfblog has a good post, links, and, especially, comments on the tax returns. One commentor suggests that they should have paid AMT, and thus underpaid about $14,000 in one year. That fits with the general naivete of the tax returns. Also, it seems they deducted a $13,000 contribution to the Congressional Black Caucus-- a political contribution! They later amended the return to fix that up. APril 22: He has released his 2007 returns now too. There is a big change: Lots of tax-exempt interest income, $200,000+ in charitable donations, AMT paid too.

Telling Children to Behave

From WSJ, Taranto, is story that tell us about Obama, social norms and breakdown in the US, Black-Hispanic relations, freedom of speech, and the difference between America and England in social responsibility.

A Barack Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention was "ticketed for calling her neighbor's African-American children 'monkeys,' " reports the Chicago Sun-Times. (We didn't realize this was against the law, but the Chicago Tribune explains that the charge was disorderly conduct.) Here is what happened, according to the Sun-Times:

[Linda] Ramirez-Sliwinski "came outside and told the children to quit playing in the tree like monkeys. The tree was not on Ramirez-Sliwinski's property," Carpentersville Police Commander Michael Kilbourne said.

Ramirez-Sliwinski admitted she used the word "monkeys," but said she did not intend racism. She said she was only trying to protect them from falling out of the tree.

"Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski said she saw the kids playing in the tree and didn't want them falling out of the tree and getting hurt. She said she calls her own grandchildren 'monkeys,' " Kilbourne said. The mother of one of the children did not see it that way, noting she and Ramirez-Sliwinski have clashed before.

"She felt it was racist because of the fact the children were African-American," Kilbourne said.

Told of the incident Monday by the Sun-Times, Obama's campaign called Ramirez-Sliwinski and persuaded her to step aside as a delegate because the campaign felt her remarks were "divisive and unacceptable."

Finally, someone Barack Obama can disown! Let this be a lesson for other Obama delegates: If someone is bothering you, shout at the top of your lungs, "God damn America!" You know Obama will stand by you then.