Hillary's Popular Vote Miscalculation

By: TJHalva | Comments [0] | Category: Hillary Clinton | 6/5/2008 3:40:12 AM CT

With news of Hillary's upcoming concession, or something equivalent, I thought I would attempt to dispel her continuing belief that she has won the popular vote. To start off, I'll illustrate the metric she is using and then move into a more thorough calculation. To begin, the table below shows the vote totals for each primary. Each race links to a government or party affiliated election results page that depicts the numbers used in this analysis. There are four races (American Somoa, Kansas, Virgin Islands, Hawaii) in which I could not find a government or party reported page detailing vote totals. For these states I cross checked results on numerous media sites to verify accuracy.

Race	Obama Votes	Clinton Votes	Total Votes	Difference (BHO-HRC)	Election Date	Election Type
New Hampshire	104815	112404	285040	-7589	Jan-8	Primary
Michigan	0	328309	328309	-328309	Jan-15	Primary
South Carolina	294898	140990	532151	153908	Jan-26	Primary
Florida	576214	870986	1749920	-294772	Jan-29	Primary
Alabama	300321	223096	536635	77225	Feb-5	Primary
Alaska	6674	2194	8880	4480	Feb-5	Primary
Arizona	193126	229501	456626	-36375	Feb-5	Primary
Arkansas	82476	220136	314234	-137660	Feb-5	Primary
California	2093318	2524799	4882620	-431481	Feb-5	Primary
Connecticut	179742	165426	355561	14316	Feb-5	Primary
Delaware	50467	39984	96374	10483	Feb-5	Primary
Georgia	704247	330026	1060851	374221	Feb-5	Primary
Illinois	1318234	667930	2038614	650304	Feb-5	Primary
Massachusetts	511680	705185	1263764	-193505	Feb-5	Primary
Missouri	406917	395185	825050	11732	Feb-5	Primary
New Jersey	501372	613500	1141199	-112128	Feb-5	Primary
New Mexico	71396	73105	149779	-1709	Feb-5	Primary
New York	751019	1068496	1862445	-317477	Feb-5	Primary
Oklahoma	130130	228480	414696	-98350	Feb-5	Primary
Tennessee	252874	336245	624764	-83371	Feb-5	Primary
Utah	74538	51333	428459	23205	Feb-5	Primary
Louisiana	220632	136925	384346	83707	Feb-9	Primary
DC	93386	29470	123994	63916	Feb-12	Primary
Maryland	532665	314211	878174	218454	Feb-12	Primary
Virginia	627820	349766	986203	278054	Feb-12	Primary
Wisconsin	646851	453954	1113753	192897	Feb-19	Primary
Ohio	982489	1212362	2233156	-229873	Mar-4	Primary
Rhode Island	75316	108949	186439	-33633	Mar-4	Primary
Texas	1362476	1462734	2874986	-100258	Mar-4	Primary
Vermont	91901	59806	154960	32095	Mar-4	Primary
Mississippi	265502	159221	434110	106281	Mar-11	Primary
Pennsylvania	1046822	1260937	2307759	-214115	Apr-22	Primary
Indiana	632035	646233	1278268	-14198	May-6	Primary
North Carolina	887391	657669	1580726	229722	May-6	Primary
West Virginia	91663	239187	357031	-147524	May-13	Primary
Kentucky	209903	459210	700855	-249307	May-20	Primary
Oregon	372823	258438	636680	114385	May-20	Primary
Puerto Rico	121458	263120	387299	-141662	Jun-1	Primary
Montana	102544	75053	181906	27491	Jun-3	Primary
South Dakota	43576	54015	97591	-10439	Jun-3	Primary
Hillary's Calculation	17011711	17528570	36254207	-516859
+ Uncommited MI for Obama	17249879	17528570	36492375	-278691

Totaling these numbers we are left with what the Clinton campaign is calling a decisive victory despite excluding 16 contests. Also notice that the 'uncommitted' votes from Michigan are not included in Obama's column. The Clinton campaign does not associate the 238,168 votes as Obama's because he electively chose to have his name removed from the ballot. At this juncture Clinton has a clear advantage but if I take into consideration the decision of the Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) pertaining to delegate allocation and apply it to raw votes a different result arises. Following their recommendation necessitates halving the votes of Florida and Michigan requiring a recalculation of primary contests.

Race	Obama Votes	Clinton Votes	Total Votes	Difference (BHO-HRC)	Election Date	Election Type
1/2 Votes Michigan	0	164154.5	164154.5	-164154.5	Jan-15	Primary
1/2 Votes Florida	288107	435493	874960	-147386	Jan-29	Primary
RBC Total	16723604	16928922.5	35348137	38612.5

Simply stunning; it appears that using the determination of the RBC gives Barack Obama the popular vote lead among primaries. As a sneak peak I'll just tell you that he accrues a significant lead in the "less important caucuses" ensuring a popular vote victory. At this point I'll digress and move onto the caucus numbers to see if Obama can dent Clinton's rather impressive lead using the full votes from Michigan and Florida.

Race	Obama Votes	Clinton Votes	Total Votes	Difference (BHO-HRC)	Election Date	Election Type
American Somoa	121	163	285	-42	Feb-5	Caucus
Colorado	80113	38839	120971	41274	Feb-5	Caucus
Idaho	16880	3655	21224	13225	Feb-5	Caucus
Kansas	27172	9462	36723	17710	Feb-5	Caucus
Minnesota	142109	68994	214066	73115	Feb-5	Caucus
North Dakota	11625	6948	19012	4677	Feb-5	Caucus
Abroad	15214	7501	23105	7713	Feb-5	Other
Nebraska	46279	43614	93757	2665	Feb-9	Caucus
Virgin Islands	1772	149	1970	1623	Feb-9	Other
Hawaii	28347	8835	37562	19512	Feb-19	Caucus
Wyoming	5378	3311	8753	2067	Mar-8	Caucus
Guam	2264	2257	4521	7	May-3	Caucus
Caucus Total	377274	193728	581949	183546

The caucus results clearly show that Obama excelled in this style of election winning all contests but American Somoa in which only 285 people voted. If we add the result of these caucuses to the primary results we get the values shown below.

Race	Obama Votes	Clinton Votes	Total Votes	Difference (BHO-HRC)	Election Date	Election Type
Hillary's + Caucuses	17388985	17722298	36836156	-333313
+ Uncommited MI for Obama	17627153	17722298	37074324	-95145

Here comes the hard part. At this point Hillary has a commanding lead but the four remaining contests (Iowa, Nevada, Washington, Maine) all of which Obama won, do not report or for that matter record individual votes. All calculations done from this point are estimates, but they attempt to include "the voice of all who voted," a rallying cry for the Clinton campaign in the closing days. This is probably redundant but it needs to be said, Hillary only cares about counting the votes when the votes in question favor her. To estimate the number of votes in each of the remaining four states I will calculate the ratio of votes per delegate using the primary and caucus results in which votes are reported. However, Texas still remains an issue. For this calculation we will assume that everybody who participated in the Texas caucus also participated in the primary. Crunching the numbers shows that 3,170.5 delegates correspond to 37,074,324 reported votes. A division yields 11,693.53 votes per delegate meaning that for every 11,693.53 people that voted for a given candidate, that candidate would be allocated 1 national delegate. Multiplying 11,693.53 by the number of delegates received in each state will yield our estimate; those estimates are shown in the table below. For Iowa the initial delegate allocation will be used because some delegates originally allocated to Edwards moved to Obama after the Edwards endorsement.

Race	Obama Votes	Clinton Votes	Total Votes	Difference (BHO-HRC)	Election Date	Election Type
Iowa	187096	163709	526209	23387	Jan-3	Caucus
Nevada	163709	128629	292338	35081	Jan-19	Caucus
Washington	619757	292338	912095	327419	Feb-9	Caucus
Maine	175403	105242	280645	70161	Feb-10	Caucus
Estimates	1145966	689918	2011287	456048

Obama makes up 450,000 votes in these four elections. Adding these totals to the previous totals we arrive at our results.

Race	Obama Votes	Clinton Votes	Total Votes	Difference (BHO-HRC)	Election Date	Election Type
Total + Estimates	18534951	18412216	38847443	122735
+ Uncommited MI for Obama	18773119	18412216	39085611	360903

The final results show that no matter how Michigan and Florida are counted, just as long as all other contests are counted Obama wins the popular vote. If at this point Clinton still wants to dispute the estimates for the four remaining caucuses she only has razor thin margins to fall back on and any additional estimates will likely reveal identical conclusions; for example RealClearPolitics.com conducted a similar analysis and the final results were comparable.

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