Alternate Reality

Sean Wilentz argues that if we had winner-take-all primaries then Hillary Clinton would be beating Barack Obama handily. This is definitely true if we just hold all the actual voting and campaigning constant, and then reapportion the delegates along Wilentz's hypothetical lines. However, it seems likely that both campaigns would have adopted different strategies if the rules were different from what they actually are.

Meanwhile, the actual race is close enough that I have no doubt that there's some plausible alternative candidate-selection mechanism under which Clinton would win fairly comfortably. Equally, though, one can imagine alternative mechanisms under which Obama would win comfortably (something very much like the current system, say, but in which California holds a caucus instead of a primary). It's just not clear what the significance of this sort of thing is. I definitely regard the current method of candidate selection as flawed and think we should change it moving forward, but the alleged desirability of some change (and the changes Wilentz proposes are not, I think, actually desirable) hardly retroactively invalidates outcomes already achieved.

[For the record, my preference would be for the nomination to be decided through a series of closed primaries that would be scheduled so as to ensure a speedier resolution than what we're seeing this cycle and with some rotation of the states so that no one or two states exercises NH/IA-style disproportionate influence; a system like that would, plausibly, have raised the chances that Clinton would be the nominee in 2008 but I still think it would be systematically preferable over the long haul to the current one]

Comments

Exactly. This is retrospective reality, minus the assumptions and actions that would have accompanied it.

From "Head of State"

http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/04/mark-down.html

"Sunday, April 06, 2008
Mark Down

...but not out:

After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as Chief Strategist of the Clinton Campaign; Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign. Geoff Garin and Howard Wolfson will coordinate the campaign's strategic message team going forward.

Clinton campaign statement, via the Nation."

Cite:
"Head of State"
http://headofstate.blogspot.com/2008/04/mark-down.html

Posted by Robert Hewson | April 7, 2008 4:32 PM

i'll put my vote in for rotating regional primaries: all of the states in a region vote on the same day; two weeks between regions; at least one 'big' state per region.

Posted by cleek | April 7, 2008 4:32 PM

I agree, but I do like the idea of having small media market states in the beginning so that less well-funded insurgent candidacies have a chance.

I mean, if the first state is Californa, Florida, or New York, then any non-establishment candidate is basically sunk.

Posted by PTS | April 7, 2008 4:33 PM

If we had a European style parliament and instant runoff voting, it would be even more different from today's situation!

Posted by El Cid | April 7, 2008 4:37 PM

how about a primary system where only trust fund scumbags get to vote? that seems fair to me

Posted by sean | April 7, 2008 4:38 PM

I think your take is correct. The whole "if everything were different, things would have turned out differently" idea is both obvious and bizarre. Moreover, Wilentz ignores the fact that the rules have been what they are and have applied to both candidates equally throughout. Knowing the rules and having both substantial resources and substantial electoral experience, Clinton and her staff made certain decisions about how to campaign, some of which were unwise, i.e., (apparently) not running strong campaigns in caucus states other than Iowa. She could have made different choices; if she had done so, she might now be in a different position.

As Marc says, the candidate selection can be improved in a number of ways, but any set of rules could potentially, because of differences in the candidates and their supporters, be more advantageous to one candidate than another. The important thing is that they are known in advance and apply to all candidates. If Wilentz think the current process is inappropriate or has produced a bad result, he should argue for changes based on principles such as fairness, efficiency, or whatever--but not on the basis that a candidate he prefers would have done better under a different system.

Posted by THS | April 7, 2008 4:40 PM

If only the states the Clinton camp says counted, then Obama wouldn't have won a single contest.

Posted by 55 | April 7, 2008 4:44 PM

The nice thing about IA is that less-funded candidates still have a chance to compete in its cheaper media market. Edwards could top Hillary in that state, even with a small fraction of her money.

I'd like to see this feature be maintained, somehow, in whatever system we move towards. As unfair as it is to have Iowa play its huge role, it's better than having the millionaires decide everything.

Posted by Neil the Ethical Werewolf | April 7, 2008 4:44 PM

all true. then again, that buttboys like wilentz and pols themselves field these arguments is nothing new or interesting. for me it's the press' complete willingness to entertain and buttress the idea (in its various incarnations) that "if things were different, they wouldn't be as they are". well, that's true! and, so what? of course, this is the same press that grants mccain his unforgivable iraq stance which boils down to "come on, baby, it'll be different this time".

Posted by al | April 7, 2008 4:45 PM

If my grandmother had balls, she would have been my grandfather.

Posted by JH | April 7, 2008 4:51 PM

And if the General Election was decided by a plurality of the votes instead of the electoral college, Al Gore would be President and who knows who the Democrat contenders this year would be?

Posted by Andy | April 7, 2008 4:52 PM

Why doesn't Wilentz just wish for winner-take-all primaries and a pony, too!

Posted by David in NY | April 7, 2008 4:53 PM

What's bizarre about this argument is that Clinton supporters are making it but also complaining about how unfair it is that the delegate allocation sometimes gives more of a state's delegates to the candidate who got fewer votes in the state. But in the proposed winner-take-all system, Clinton would be winning handily in delegates now even though she's behind in the supposedly holy popular vote.

Posted by KCinDC | April 7, 2008 4:58 PM

THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!! FOR HILLARY!!!

Posted by idiotic | April 7, 2008 4:59 PM

Hmm

Democrats are opposed to ID checks in general elections, on the (specious) grounds that they are discriminatory.

So how do you plan to run a closed (i.e., party members only) primary w/o ID checks? Is it all honor system based?

Posted by James Robertson | April 7, 2008 5:03 PM

If only the big states counted, Clinton definitely would have won.

And If my Aunt had balls she’d be my Uncle.

Posted by Peter K. | April 7, 2008 5:04 PM

I'm not a big football fan, but an analogy from that sport seems to be the most appropriate here.

http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2006/03/rationally_spea.php

After Notre Dame beat USC in a football game at the Los Angeles Coliseum in the 1920s, the losing coach told reporters that the Trojans had more first downs than the Fightin' Irish. Upon returning to South Bend and reading the newspaper account of the game, Knute Rockne, Notre Dame's legendary coach, sent his counterpart a telegram with the following message: "The next time you want to play for first downs, let me know."

Posted by Josh G. | April 7, 2008 5:09 PM

Also, if instead of the reality of being mired in a precariously stateless civil-war chaos, Iraq had turned out like some sort of middle-eastern Meiji / Switzerland paradise state, the Republicans would be totally dominating.

Posted by El Cid | April 7, 2008 5:14 PM

Read the whole thing. On the second page, it gets remarkably hacky and propagandistic for a headline article, even one on Salon. It's so bad, it makes you wonder what Salon is thinking. For example, Wilentz makes some unsubstantiated charges about the Obama camp actively working to suppress re-vote efforts in Florida and Michigan.

Posted by Ban Johnson | April 7, 2008 5:19 PM

Perhaps Dr. Wilentz would like to visit one of my classes and learn how changing the objective function changes the optimal strategies. Given a finite number of resources, it should be clear that the solution v_i* to:

max sum[d_i(v_i(q_i)/V_i)]
s.t. sum q_i=Q

is different than

max sum[v_i(q_i)]
s.t. sum q_i=Q

is different than

max sum[e_i if v_i(q_i)>w_i and 0 if not]
s.t. sum q_i=Q

where i indexes states, d is delegates, v is votes received, V is total voters in a state q is resources spent, Q is total resources, e is 'electoral votes', and w is votes received by opponents

(that's my hack job of writing down objective functions for maximizing delegates based on proportional representation/caucusing, maximizing total votes, and maximizing electoral votes)

There's probably a whole bunch of other types of objective functions we could imagine (count the big states! don't count black people!), all of which produce different strategies (again, hello limited resources) - and it shouldn't be suprising that running the optimal strategies from the existing objective functions through a bunch of other hypothetical (and not necessarily undesirable) objective functions produces different winners.

Posted by TheF79 | April 7, 2008 5:21 PM

And if the General Election was decided by a plurality of the votes instead of the electoral college, Al Gore would be President and who knows who the Democrat contenders this year would be?

I would bet the Democrats would nominate Vice President Lieberman this year. Heeee....

Of course, it's funny to see Democrats arguing this year that all these things don't matter when Democrats could and did argue that Gore deserved to be President on the basis of his plurality popular vote win and therefore that Bush was only the "pResident".

Posted by Al | April 7, 2008 5:25 PM

So how do you plan to run a closed (i.e., party members only) primary w/o ID checks? Is it all honor system based?

It works the same way for a closed primary as it does for any other election. The fact that it's a primary, closed or open, is irrelevant to the issue of ID checks. If there's all this rampant voter fraud the Republicans are talking about, they should be able to point to lots of actual cases of it occurring, and there should have been plenty of prosecutions.

Posted by KCinDC | April 7, 2008 5:25 PM

KCinDC, just to add a bit to your point: the one place where voter fraud has been proven in some places is in absentee voting, where ID checks do nothing.

Posted by Antid Oto | April 7, 2008 5:30 PM

You know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I feel that the most sensible system for candidate selection would be a series of caucuses and primaries much as we have now, with one difference: in the event that no candidate garners a two-thirds majority in both the popular vote and the delegate count, instant runoff voting removes all but the top two candidates. If this also fails to produce a clear winner (by the aforementioned two-thirds standard), the two remaining candidates will settle the issue in a knife fight.

Posted by Peter | April 7, 2008 5:31 PM

The problem with the current system, at least for primary states, is that the winner of a primary doesn't get enough delegates. A better system would be that the winner of a states' primary would get a bonus of, say, 20% of the delegates off the top. The other 80% of the delegates to be divided according to the percentage of the vote each candidate received, with, say, a requirement that a candidate receive 5% of the vote to get any delegates. Thus, suppose that 100 delegates are at stake and three candidates A, B, and C compete. Suppose A gets 40%, B gets 35% and C gets 25% of the vote. Then A would be awarded 52 delegates, B would be awarded 28 delegates and C would be awarded 20 delagates.

Posted by SLC | April 7, 2008 5:32 PM

I actually think that the proportional delegate system is going to work in the Democrats' favor as long as the eventual winner is perceived by virtually everyone in the party as the legitimate nominee who won fair and square. If that means that the primary goes on until early June, then so be it. Whatever it takes for everyone to agree beyond any reasonable doubt that one candidate is the clear winner and the other is the clear loser. The only sure way for the Dems to blow the general election is to nominate someone who is not seen as legitimate by about half the party.

A winner-take-all system is almost certain to give you a quick resolution, but a proportional system can sometimes produce long battles that force Dem candidates to campaign hard in parts of the country that almost never see them. Who knows, maybe the extended Dem campaign has put one or two red states into play without anyone even realizing it.

Posted by Moonlight | April 7, 2008 5:34 PM

So how do you plan to run a closed (i.e., party members only) primary w/o ID checks? Is it all honor system based?

My guess would be that they check which party affiliation you indicated when you registered. My driver's license doesn't list my political party on it anyway.

Posted by ibid | April 7, 2008 5:47 PM

Sean Wilentz is one half of the Princeton Clinton Cabal - the other is Paul Krugman

According to sources (TNR and others ) both are likely Clinton cabinet members

The last piece Wilentz wrote claimed the Obama started the "race card"

Obviously his is a disingenuous point of view--

--
Besides: the Democratic Party has rules - they worked for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 - the only reason all the Clinton sympathizers are having this electoral conversation now is that Hillary Clinton has lost this nomination

But she did this knowing the rules in advance
--
I could say I wish I bought Microsoft in 1990 -- but I didn't --

Flawed logic all around

Posted by alison | April 7, 2008 5:51 PM

I find it interesting that so many "what-if" scenarios have been manufactured for to demonstrate how Hillary could have been ahead Obama...If Obama were behind Clinton, we wouldn't engage in this analysis paralysis.

In fact, the election would be over.

Posted by AKBY | April 7, 2008 5:54 PM

Sean Wilentz argues that if we had winner-take-all primaries then Hillary Clinton would be beating Barack Obama handily....It's just not clear what the significance of this sort of thing is.

Umm...maybe the significance of it is that that is how it will be done in the general election??

Sheeesh...even though I'm voting for Obama, this purposeful obtuseness on the part of some Obama supporters is maddening.

Posted by Dennis Doubleday | April 7, 2008 5:55 PM

Of course, it's funny to see Democrats arguing this year that all these things don't matter

What things don't matter? Popular votes? Pluralities? Who's saying that? Not even Obama supporter here, whose candidate is leading under the current system, are defending that system on the merits. They're just saying the contest has to be decided under the rules which currently exist.

Democrats could and did argue that Gore deserved to be President on the basis of his plurality popular vote win

Lame effort at rewriting history, Al. Believing Al Gore deserved the Presidency did not require wishing away the electoral college system in favor of the national popular vote. It merely required asserting that Gore won the *Florida* popular vote. It was *Republicans* who said determining that didn't matter.

Posted by Ryan | April 7, 2008 5:58 PM

"Democrats are opposed to ID checks in general elections, on the (specious) grounds that they are discriminatory."

A natural born sophist, I see. So concerned about electoral veracity, are we? Goodness knows you could probably direct everyone with links to "fair and balanced" sites that positively burst with sordid tales of massive voter fraud due to the lack of the "Official You Have the Right to Vote as Long You Have This Card" cards.

I voted in the Iowa caucus without having to show my super official, RNC approved voter ID and decoder ring. I've voted in state and federal elections without a full body cavity search and "papers".

I was also once a member of the Republican Party (I was young and foolish) where voter suppression is openly discussed, endorsed and encouraged. From the historic poll testing to the newly minted caging, Republican (and the earlier Democratic forebears they embraced) leadership has demonstrated its willingness by any means to disenfranchise those it deems unfit for participation in a representative democracy.

There are plenty of on-line dictionaries, which provide a clear and concise definition of the word "specious", as in "specious argument". Perhaps you should look it up prior to making your next one.

"Is it all honor system based?"

Yes it is, and the system depends upon its participants demonstrating a modest scintilla of said honor along with a just smidgeon of probity...

Posted by Rihilism | April 7, 2008 6:01 PM

I'll ask again - in a supposedly closed primary, if all you do is ask for party affiliation, you're asking for game playing by members of the opposing party.

Posted by James Robertson | April 7, 2008 6:03 PM

However, it seems likely that both campaigns would have adopted different strategies if the rules were different from what they actually are.

I don't know... I think you might be reaching there. While Obama may well have pursued a different strategy, there's evidence that the Clinton campaign was operating under the assumption that the current system was winner-take-all until a couple of weeks before Texas... remember all the complaints about that convoluted "prima-caucus?" I don't think they paid enough attention early to what the rules were.

Posted by Lukeness | April 7, 2008 6:05 PM

Can somebody remind me why the notion of a national election (as in, all states vote the same day) is thrown out from any consideration?

Apparently it's so wrong for primaries that nobody talks about it, yet it's so right for general elections that nobody talks about changing this.

What am I missing? How is everybody voting the same day less democratic?

Posted by Torteya | April 7, 2008 6:11 PM

Dennis Doubleday,

There will be a different electorate for the general election and different candidates. Making the mechanism a bit more similar isn't going to change those profound differences.

So who exactly is being obtuse?

Posted by DTM | April 7, 2008 6:18 PM

"Democrats are opposed to ID checks in general elections, on the (specious) grounds that they are discriminatory. "

Interesting, and ridiculous, James Robertson.

ID checks are "discriminatory" for several reasons:

1. There are 0 recent occurances of voters voting twice in the US. 0. The closest thing to "Voter Fraud" in this country is Ann Coulter lying about her home address (she was registered in the wrong Florida precinct -- THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!). Your GOP just wasted 4 years of the DOJ's time and $millions$ researching the issue, go ask them for clarification on the numbers.

2. Elderly people who no longer drive, and 18yos in places like NYC (where you have to be 18 to obtain a license, and many never do), don't necessarily have ID cards when the election rolls around. They don't really need them in day-to-day life. We all know 85yo grandmas are vote-packing every cycle, I hear they drive around in packed vans and vote in 12 States. We further recognize anything that makes it harder for 18yos in urban areas to vote is A#1 in the GOP playbook, but is not in the interest of the nation.

3. The GOP held up purple-coloured fingers in the Congressional Chamber back when Iraq held their first election. Political stunt?? I think not. The purple-finger 'system' - voting without ID cards and placing ink on the finger to indicate voting - is fair enough for the nation we occupied but apparently not fair enough to use here, where paying for an ID card (in most States they are not free) and having it on-hand at the voting booth are the new pre-requisites for voting. Can you say Poll Taxes?

4. People who argue, essentially, that "You need an ID card for 'everything else,' what's wrong with requiring it for voting" make the extraordinary leap that everybody is boarding planes or driving cars or arrested regularly. Elderly people and young people may be doing none of these things, may therefore have little need for ID, and should not theretofore have their voting rights restricted (wasn't this country founded on our right to live as we choose?).

If you haven't realized the purpose for ID cards is not to prevent 'voter fraud,' which doesn't exist, but is in fact to prevent voting (in a nation with fairly modest voter turnout) then you've missed the intellectual boat.

Posted by Miguel Pakalns | April 7, 2008 6:22 PM

Fortunately, there's a procedure for evaluating subjunctive conditionals. Look at the nearest possible world at which the antecedent is true and see if the consequent is true. At the nearest world at which the Democrats had radically different delegate apportionment rules, Obama would have spent many fewer resources racking up huge margins in small and mid-sized states. So, T ---> F is F.

Simple enough for Wilentz to understand.

Posted by Daniel Koffler | April 7, 2008 6:31 PM

James Robertson --

On the second part of your "question:"

When people register to vote, they may register a Party (in many States).

When they show up at their voting precinct, their name and Party registration is recorded on the roll. They state their name, sign their name on the line, vote, and leave.

Elections have been held this way for decades in this country.

Your confusion about our process is baffling: Have you never voted, sir?

Do you know of many people who had trouble remembering their name at the voting booth? (admittedly, dementia may cause the occasional problem)

Do you know of many people who forgot how to sign their name? (unfortunately, yes, the non-ID sign-your-name process disadvantages the illiterate, thankfully a very small slice of our population)

Posted by Miguel Pakalns | April 7, 2008 6:32 PM

"I'll ask again - in a supposedly closed primary, if all you do is ask for party affiliation, you're asking for game playing by members of the opposing party."

Given the lack of demonstrable proof that such "gaming" exists at a level that would lead to massive fraud and illegitimate elections, coupled with the fear of equally damaging retribution and mischief, such “specious” notions pale when measured against a real and ongoing threat of disenfranchisement.

Adding another tier of "verification" that neither provides protection nor insures an equitable outcome accomplishes nothing and, as history has taught us, is rife for abuse.

Posted by Rihilism | April 7, 2008 6:47 PM

For the record, my preference would be for the nomination to be decided through a series of closed primaries...

Does this mean that MY is against caucuses? While I agree that caucuses are weird and definitely less democratic than an ordinary primary, it seems to me that being democratic is not necessarily in the party's interest when it comes to selecting a candidate. The reason is because the purpose is not just to elect a candidate for president, but also to build and strengthen the party.

Whereas primaries reward the candidate with the broadest, most horizontal popular support, caucuses reward voter intensity and organization (vertical popular support). I bet that in the smaller states--or just any state whose priority is growing the ranks of the party--having this intensity and organization is more important for a candidate than having broad popularity within the current base of the party.

I agree that the schedule should have a round-robin element to it to make things more fair for the different regions, and that the schedule should be contracted at least somewhat. But a short election cycle consisting of just primaries seems too geared toward ascertaining the will of the current base of supporters, and not geared enough toward growing the party and improving organization.

Indeed, for all of the complaining you hear on the internets about how bad for the party the long primary season is, it's mostly couched in hypotheticals--Democrats might not vote if their primary candidate loses, McCain could pull ahead as he consolidates his base while the Dems bicker, etc. But the benefits of the long, drawn-out primary are very real: voter turnout for the Democratic contests is breaking records and dwarfing Republican turnout, and more people are registering Democrat than Republican.

Posted by David Morris | April 7, 2008 7:13 PM

Meh. Counterfactuals' truth value are utterly non-demonstrable, relying as they do for their support on other counterfactuals (or some ceteris paribus clause which is at bottom circular).

May just as well close the circle from the get-go and not be a coward about it: If we adopted a Clitnon-take-all system, then Clinton would be ahead right now. Done.

Posted by sherifffruitfly | April 7, 2008 7:26 PM

If it was an "alternate" reality rather than an "alternative" one, then next time around Clinton would win, and Obama would take the nomination in 2016, and Clinton would stage a comeback in 2020...

Thankfully the alternative of an alternate reality is unlikely.

Posted by Estrien | April 7, 2008 7:49 PM

If they'd just never given women the right to vote, Obama would be handing it to Clinton.

Posted by TH | April 7, 2008 7:51 PM

As Jon Chait put it, if my grandmother had wheels, Clinton would be winning. Or as WaPo put it, Clinton has won the states needed to spell out "c-h-i-ef" which is sadly out of reach now for Obama.

Umm...maybe the significance of it is that that is how it will be done in the general election?? --Dennis Doubleday
But the two groups of voters are not the same. This is like Bayh's argument for electoral votes, where beating your Democratic challenger in a state means you would beat the Republican candidate in that state. Winning a majority of Dems in a state is not a test of your ability to win or lose the state in the general.

Like others, I'm happy to change things next time. I even encourage it. But arguing that Hillary would be winning if we had been using different rules but everyone acted the same, as though the old rules were still in place, is an argument that may yet get my daughter the pony she dreams of.

Posted by Deborah | April 7, 2008 7:57 PM

Miguel Pakalns owns this thread. Nicely argued.

Posted by sweaty guy | April 7, 2008 8:06 PM

"...voter turnout for the Democratic contests is breaking records and dwarfing Republican turnout, and more people are registering Democrat than Republican."-David Morris

It should be noted that during the 1988 primary, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in voter turnout and enthusiasm , and look where it got them.

Posted by Micheline | April 7, 2008 8:09 PM

James Robertson is either being completely disingenuous (likely) or he's the stupidest motherfucker who ever learned to operate a computer (not outside the realm of possibility).

Posted by Seitz | April 7, 2008 9:54 PM

The problem for Clinton was that Axelrod knew the rules of the game better than Penn. (Or that Michelle Obama was better at tightening the Obama campaign's strategy than Bill Clinton.)

One thing is clear -- and in character from Obama's earlier political career -- the Obama campaign looked very closely at the Democratic party's 'rules as written' then played by them as tightly as they could.

Clinton, meanwhile, stumbled on her own strategy: which was "why bother knowing the rules, when we know I'm going to win."

Posted by Carrington Ward | April 7, 2008 10:01 PM

"Apparently it's so wrong for primaries that nobody talks about it, yet it's so right for general elections that nobody talks about changing this.
What am I missing? How is everybody voting the same day less democratic?"
--Torteya

Because the contest would come down to who has a) national name recognition; b) a billion dollars. Bloomburg, or a former president or vice president (or now, first lady). It's too narrow a pool of serious contendors. All candidates would need to introduce themselves to 250 million voters at once.

The staggered primaries give more weight to early voters, but they also give someone with good ideas and some support an opportunity to grow that support. Watching this season, I'm very convinced of the importance of having a few small states first, because a candidate like, say, Dodd, had a chance to convince a smaller field that he really knows what he's talking about. Or not. After a few small states, rotating regional primaries, and kudos to the Rs for tackling this.

Look what numbers Clinton starts at, and what happens to Obama's as he campaigns--just independent of how much you like either one, the national brand candidate starts out higher on sheer name recognition. The newer candidate needs to campaign to get his or her message across, become familiar to voters, etc. It'd be nice if everyone carefully examined the websites of all candidates and did their own research, or at least perused their newspaper's breakdown of the various candidates, but that's not how it happens.

Posted by Deborah | April 7, 2008 11:45 PM

I went to the trouble of ripping this article apart from bow to stern earlier today. The arguments made in it are completely absurd. You can view my deconstruction of the piece here:

http://www.theleftanchor.com/2008/04/salon-if-things.html

Posted by Big Blue | April 8, 2008 1:10 AM

You know, if we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs if we had some eggs.

Posted by Adam Villani | April 8, 2008 3:00 AM

Salon has gotten into the habit of writing hit-generating pieces, and I'm sure that was the 'logic' behind running Wilentz's editorial-- and with over 800 comments, that's what they got. (Editor Joan Walsh is also quite sympathetic to Hillary, though she's put out pieces critical of both candidates.)

Posted by Persia | April 8, 2008 9:43 AM

Many of you misidentify the issue here. It is not Clinton trying to call which states count, but rather a matter of being sure primaries are conducted in a way that allow for as many willing and eligible voters to participate (and have their vote counted) as possible. Caucuses simply fail at that (in addition to being a public record of how you, and eg your husband, voted).

As for Michigan and Florida, I would be curious to see if the bulk of Obama supporters maintained their contention that "rules are rules" in November if The Terminator and the Republican controlled NY State Senate found a way to move up their general elections by a week, thus negating all of the electoral college from two hugely democratic states. Again, not an issue of rules being laid out, but more about those rules being absurdly undemocratic. how can you support the disenfranchisement of millions of voters due to the actions of a few??

Posted by pskits | April 8, 2008 4:21 PM

pskits,

First, Clinton didn't criticize the DNC's actions until after SC voted, and indeed supported the DNC's actions up until that time. Regardless of the merits of the arguments you are making, that doesn't constitute a defense of Clinton's highly unethical behavior.

Second, this isn't the general election, it is a political party deciding how to choose its nominee for the general election. If that party thinks it is beneficial to allow caucuses, enforce a certain primary schedule, and so on, that is pretty much that party's business. Indeed, there is no general rule that a political party has to use elections at all to choose its nominee.

That said, of course interested party members are free to advocate for the nomination system they think would be best for the party. But this "disenfranchisement" talk is a bit odd, seeing as how party members do not actually have a fundamental right to choose their nominee through a voting process.

Posted by DTM | April 8, 2008 5:09 PM