Crunching the Popular Vote Numbers

For my part I think that the superdelegates should be able to consider whatever they want when deciding between Clinton and Obama, and if they want to take seriously the idea that cobbling together a national popular vote makes any sense, more power to them. Along with “Obama can’t win the big states, so kiss New York and California goodbye”, the national popular vote notion has been one of the few remaining tropes that the Clinton-supporting blogosphere can trot out with a straight face. Mark Schmitt, however, crunches the numbers and demonstrates that this line of thinking doesn’t solve any of Clinton’s problems. Even accepting a big Clinton win in Pennsylvania and a win in the Florida re-vote as big as her win in the straw poll, Clinton remains substantially behind Obama. To close the gap she would need to win huge in Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, and a Michigan re-vote, and virtually tie Obama in such states as Oregon and North Carolina.

In short, it’s remarkably difficult to imagine a plausible scenario in which Obama doesn’t reach the convention with leads in the popular vote and the pledged delegate total. A Clinton victory would almost inevitably involve the superdelegates overturning both of those outcomes. The only other option, I suppose, is pushing the Lukasiak “we can use exit polls to demonstrate that Clinton wins a subset of the popular vote” nonsense, but it’s hard for me to believe that even the people peddling that line take it very seriously.