Wow, so, Super Tuesday (or Wednesday for me). I’m sure that, if you’re terribly curious, you can read all the information, statistics, exit polls, and punditry you’ll ever want regarding this. So, in the interests of not boring our dear readers to death, I’ll only touch on two things:
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Superdelegates – Superdelegates, or unpledged delegates, are democratic politicians and other assorted random people who wield power within the party. They are roughly one fifth of all delegates.
Unlike pledged delegates, superdelegates have the ability to vote as they please, regardless of who wins their associated state. There are also unpledged delegates in the Republican Party, but their impact this election will be negligible as McCain has already locked up the nomination.
Some news outlets, like CNN, are currently including superdelegates who have endorsed a candidate in their delegate counts. As I write this, CNN currently shows Clinton leading Obama 823 to 741, or by 82 delegates. However, if you look at the detailed breakdown, you can see that the pledged delegate count (the people who can’t change their votes on a whim) is actually 630 to 635 in favor of Obama.
Now, assuming the Democratic Party isn’t reprehensibly stupid, the superdelegates will not vote against the winner of the pledged delegate count, who is essentially the winner of the democratic popular vote. I realize that’s a bold assumption that has been proven wrong on countless occasions in the past, but I’d like to think they’ve learned something since then.
So, my problem is that including superdelegates in the total count completely changes the media narrative. These totals make Clinton appear to have an 80 delegate cushion, when the reality is that she’s already behind Obama. That’s a pretty significant difference, if you ask me.
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The Clinton Five Million Challenge – After news broke that the Clintons pumped five million of their own money into Hillary’s campaign, team Obama decided to use it as a rallying cry for their own fundraising. Well, here’s how that turned out:
Yes we can, and yes we did.
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Oh man. I’ve always been annoyed at the (non)Democratic superdelegate shenanigans. Most friends I know who voted with me in the primary are just learning about it this year. It’s annoying to realize how easily a handful of seated party members could negate the majority opinion of whole states.
We’re also annoyed that Hillary took Massachusetts so easily. What’s up with that?
I haven’t read up too much on Massachusetts, but she clearly appeared to have an significant advantage in the more populous of the Northeastern states, excluding Connecticut.
Some have said that the Kennedy endorsement came too late, or that more local democratic machines supported Clinton and mobilized her supporters. Others have trotted out the old “young people support Obama, but young people have terrible voter turnout” line. I don’t think there’s any one, clear cause at this point (except for New York, which.. yeah, that one’s obvious).
Whatever the cause, at least we can take comfort in the fact that the delegates are proportionally awarded, and that it’s not winner take all. Yet.
Thanks for linking to the video at the end there. I saw the original speech, which was very good on its own, but I hadn’t seen that video yet. Got my warm fuzzy for the day.
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