Fascinating piece out of Salon today by Princeton history professor and avowed Clintonista Sean Wilentz on how HRC has been hung up by the Dems’ Byzantine electoral process:
Obama's advantage hinges on a system that, whatever the actual intentions behind it, seems custom-made to hobble Democratic chances in the fall. It depends on ignoring one of the central principles of American electoral politics, one that will be operative on a state-by-state basis this November, which is that the winner takes all. If the Democrats ran their nominating process the way we run our general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton would have a commanding lead in the delegate count, one that will only grow more commanding after the next round of primaries, and all questions about which of the two Democratic contenders is more electable would be moot.
This, of course, has been Hillary’s take for months.
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And Wilentz’s take is a little bit of a flimsy one. Rules is rules, and if the rules were different, it seems reasonable to imagine that Obama would have been running a different kind of campaign, one that focused less on eeking out wins in small states and pouring more resources into the big-ticket items.
And for what it’s worth, the Dems, by doing proportional representation, do the thing right. It means that voters in every state, even those that vastly favor one candidate or another, count, unlike in the general election, which for all intents and purposes, disenfranchises all voters except those in Ohio.
Comments (1)
So under this scenario, it seems likely that Hillary would have been leading in delegates at the same time she was losing the national popular vote, as she is right now. Sorry, that doesn't work for me. The delegate count reflects the popular vote. She got beat and now she's trying to change the rules.