I was going to run these numbers, but fortunately I never got around to it, meaning I can just lazily link to and quote Nate:
turnout in Michigan was equal to 24 percent of John Kerry’s vote in 2004. However, the average in other states with open primaries was 79 percent. In other words, turnout was only about one-third as much as it should have been. The judgment of two-thirds of the voters in Michigan was essentially that the primary didn’t matter and wasn’t worth their time.
Florida was a little bit more normal. Turnout was equal to 48 percent of John Kerry’s vote; the average in other closed primary states was 59 percent.
Given the extremely low turnout, it was magnanimous of the Obama campaign to agree to only a halving of the voting weight of the Michigan delegation. A quarter to one-third of the voting weight might have been reasonable but, as far as I know, was never proposed.
Nate separately makes a convincing case as to why the final deal on Michigan not only counts the votes for “Uncommitted” for Obama, but also re-weights the actual votes, which amounts to a shift of 4 additional delegates his wayaa:
why not instead sign off Clinton the 73-55 delegate split that her campaign desired? It’s only a difference of a few delegates.
Well, if you did that, you’d be reflecting the Clinton/uncommitted preference from the unsanctioned primary. Which means that you’d be tending to legitimate the results of that primary. Which means that Clinton would have had a stronger claim for including Michigan in her popular vote count. And the popular vote count is different way that Clinton has tended to imply that Obama’s nomination is not legitimate. If Clinton hadn’t pushed the popular vote meme so noisily, in other words, Obama would probably have given her those four extra delegates.
Finally, as long as I am making this planting a 538 multi-graft, see this from a few days ago on re-estimating the Michigan vote:
I am going to take each of Michigan’s 15 congressional districts, contemplate their key demographics, and identify comparable congressional districts in other states where Barack Obama’s name did appear on the ballot.aa [...]
Overall, we project that Obama would have carried Michigan by a narrow margin — about 4.0 percentage points or 80,000 votes. After accounting for delegates awarded at the statewide level, we project him to win 65 Michigan delegates to Clinton’s 63. [...]
To assert that the uncommitted vote is an adequate substitute for Obama’s vote does not hold water, when we have abundant evidence from similar states like Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Missouri that Obama would have performed quite well in Michigan.
In the end, noisy dissent by a few Clintonite dead-enders notwithstanding, the bargain struck yesterday seems quite fair from this vantage point. But Josh Putnam explains the compromise best of all.
_________
a
- It is not clear to me if that is 4 delegates, each with half a voting weight, or 8 delegates with a weighted voting equivalent of 4.aaa
- Along with that of John Edwards, though Nate did not include estimated Edwards votes, because most or all of the districts in question are in states that voted after Edwards dropped out. Edwards still had an active campaign at the time of the unsanctioned Michigan primary. Presumably he would have invested in Michigan, as well as Florida. Would these states have kept his campaign alive at least through 5 Feb.? And if they had, would it have altered the Obama-Clinton dynamic of the race? My guess is, yes, and maybe in a big way. And in Clinton’s ultimate favor, I would think.aaa
a
I could not disagree more. I am not a Clinton dead-ender, nor do I see Obama and Clinton as the issue here. It seems to me that the Michigan delegation has been anointed from on high by the RBC.
Whether they acted with the best motives or the worst makes no difference.
Once an election tribunal substitutes its own decision for that of the electors by making second guesses about who may have voted or would have voted, why they would have voted and how they would have voted, you are on a short road to chaos, and one moreover, that adopts precisely the reasoning of the Bush v Gore court.
Seed planted by Alan — 01 June 2008 @ 22:46
Florida and Michigan are rather different here. A substantial part of the electorate in the latter did not exercise its franchise, perhaps because they were under the impression that it was not a legitimate contest.
Seed planted by MSS — 02 June 2008 @ 11:33