Joseph Lane ... More Fuzzy Math: Why the Primaries Mean Whatever We Want Them to Mean
[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry. ]
This is not the post that I had planned for the day after New Hampshire. I had a brilliant little piece on the self-immolation of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and I can only thank the moderators for stopping me. I am probably in good company as most of the columnists in the country were wearing out their delete buttons or busy with re-writes. I will keep that piece somewhere close by to remind myself why I am an academic and not on television.
So Hillary “won,” and now she can expect a healthy bounce in the polls to show for her “victory.” She should be cautious about believing any of it because there will be much hand-wringing over what is wrong with our major media outlets’ polling outfits given how badly they blew modeling the New Hampshire electorate. Will the polls that show that she is back be any better than those that showed that she was dead?
However, I am thinking about another type of mathematical peculiarity in this process - namely, in what sense did Clinton “win” in New Hampshire?
About 270,000 New Hampshire voters went to the Democratic primary polls, and Clinton garnered about 7,500 more of those votes than Obama did. That is a margin of 2-3% points depending on how you choose to round (and the Clinton camp loves MSNBC and others who put Obama at 36% rather than 37%). She appears to “win” because she had more votes.
However, when we call this a “win,” we are confirming what I have argued before in this blog, namely that our presidential selection process is not a state-by-state race for convention delegates who will gather next August to nominate candidates for the major parties. If we were looking for delegate counts to determine who “wins” New Hampshire, we would say that this was a tie. There are 22 Democratic delegates selected by the New Hampshire primary, and by that count, the score is Clinton 9, Obama 9, and Edwards 4.
When we said Obama “won” Iowa, we were talking about the delegates to the state party convention. We had nothing else to talk about. We don’t know how many Iowans actually went to the polls to caucus for each candidate because the Iowa Democrats keep raw vote totals secret from the general public. There’s good reason to do so given that the formula distorts the actual vote count in funny and unpredictable ways that might compromise Iowa’s reputation for having such a “serious” process if it were fully revealed.
See my earlier post on this topic, but the short version is this - In one room of the small town high school where I watched the caucus, Obama garnered nine more votes than Edwards and got the same number of delegates. In the next room of the same small town high school, Obama garnered one more vote than Edwards and got one more delegate. Make sense? In fact, some estimates assert that in 2004, Edwards persuaded more Iowans to caucus for him than Kerry did, and yet Kerry got more delegates because he was strong in the right precincts.
However, if you think New Hampshire is blessedly and democratically more straightforward than Iowa, think again. Not only did Obama earn as many delegates for his second place finish as Clinton did for finishing first, but it is also possible that Edwards could end up in a tie with them for control of the New Hampshire delegation, even though he received fewer than half of the votes that his rivals did on Tuesday night.
New Hampshire has 22 delegates who are selected by and bound by the results of the primary and 5 more super delegates, Democratic party insiders and officials who are free to vote for whomever they choose. If all five chose to go for Edwards, he would have as large a share of the New Hampshire delegation as Obama or Clinton - 9 delegates for everyone.
Of course that probably won’t happen, but it is another reminder that the real power of these early state contests is not at all related to the actual number of votes cast or the actual number of delegates won. The five New Hampshire super delegates have as much power over the delegation as 80,000 New Hampshire voters. The delegate counts, and even the vote counts, are fascinating scorecards with no bearing on reality. As of right now, Romney has the most pledged delegates among the Republicans. Does anyone on the planet think that he is “winning”?
All of this brings me back to the real point that we should have in mind - We are engaged in a bizarre national election in which those with money, power, party influence, or time to volunteer throw themselves progressively at a series of early states, trying to use national resources to convince a small group of localized voters to cast ballots for their chosen candidate. The value of those votes is directly proportional to our willingness to believe that those votes represent some reality that is meaningful in determining America’s choice for presidential candidates.
If we believe that Joe Biden’s failure to get over the 15% threshold in those Iowa caucus precincts means that he is not a viable candidate, he is not a viable candidate and thus drops out. If we believe that Rudolph Giuliani’s sixth and fourth place showings are OK because he did not “try to win” in Iowa and New Hampshire (all the money he spent in New Hampshire notwithstanding), he is still in the running. At the same time, if we believe that a pair of fifth place finishes for Ron Paul is proof that he is on the lunatic fringe (in spite of the fact that he has garnered nearly 5,000 more actual votes than Giuliani at this point), then he is on the lunatic fringe. It is a fascinating exercise in building (and tearing down) castles from thin air.
We could do all of this without the actual voters or the election night rallies and speeches. They are, in some respects, utterly superfluous to the actual dynamics of the race. Next week, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic front-runner, not because of what New Hampshire voters did but because of what we have decided her “win” “means.” We could get this whole experience just by reading the columnists and the daily polling reports, but then again, they have their own problems with fuzzy math.
Read entire article at Britannica Blog
This is not the post that I had planned for the day after New Hampshire. I had a brilliant little piece on the self-immolation of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and I can only thank the moderators for stopping me. I am probably in good company as most of the columnists in the country were wearing out their delete buttons or busy with re-writes. I will keep that piece somewhere close by to remind myself why I am an academic and not on television.
So Hillary “won,” and now she can expect a healthy bounce in the polls to show for her “victory.” She should be cautious about believing any of it because there will be much hand-wringing over what is wrong with our major media outlets’ polling outfits given how badly they blew modeling the New Hampshire electorate. Will the polls that show that she is back be any better than those that showed that she was dead?
However, I am thinking about another type of mathematical peculiarity in this process - namely, in what sense did Clinton “win” in New Hampshire?
About 270,000 New Hampshire voters went to the Democratic primary polls, and Clinton garnered about 7,500 more of those votes than Obama did. That is a margin of 2-3% points depending on how you choose to round (and the Clinton camp loves MSNBC and others who put Obama at 36% rather than 37%). She appears to “win” because she had more votes.
However, when we call this a “win,” we are confirming what I have argued before in this blog, namely that our presidential selection process is not a state-by-state race for convention delegates who will gather next August to nominate candidates for the major parties. If we were looking for delegate counts to determine who “wins” New Hampshire, we would say that this was a tie. There are 22 Democratic delegates selected by the New Hampshire primary, and by that count, the score is Clinton 9, Obama 9, and Edwards 4.
When we said Obama “won” Iowa, we were talking about the delegates to the state party convention. We had nothing else to talk about. We don’t know how many Iowans actually went to the polls to caucus for each candidate because the Iowa Democrats keep raw vote totals secret from the general public. There’s good reason to do so given that the formula distorts the actual vote count in funny and unpredictable ways that might compromise Iowa’s reputation for having such a “serious” process if it were fully revealed.
See my earlier post on this topic, but the short version is this - In one room of the small town high school where I watched the caucus, Obama garnered nine more votes than Edwards and got the same number of delegates. In the next room of the same small town high school, Obama garnered one more vote than Edwards and got one more delegate. Make sense? In fact, some estimates assert that in 2004, Edwards persuaded more Iowans to caucus for him than Kerry did, and yet Kerry got more delegates because he was strong in the right precincts.
However, if you think New Hampshire is blessedly and democratically more straightforward than Iowa, think again. Not only did Obama earn as many delegates for his second place finish as Clinton did for finishing first, but it is also possible that Edwards could end up in a tie with them for control of the New Hampshire delegation, even though he received fewer than half of the votes that his rivals did on Tuesday night.
New Hampshire has 22 delegates who are selected by and bound by the results of the primary and 5 more super delegates, Democratic party insiders and officials who are free to vote for whomever they choose. If all five chose to go for Edwards, he would have as large a share of the New Hampshire delegation as Obama or Clinton - 9 delegates for everyone.
Of course that probably won’t happen, but it is another reminder that the real power of these early state contests is not at all related to the actual number of votes cast or the actual number of delegates won. The five New Hampshire super delegates have as much power over the delegation as 80,000 New Hampshire voters. The delegate counts, and even the vote counts, are fascinating scorecards with no bearing on reality. As of right now, Romney has the most pledged delegates among the Republicans. Does anyone on the planet think that he is “winning”?
All of this brings me back to the real point that we should have in mind - We are engaged in a bizarre national election in which those with money, power, party influence, or time to volunteer throw themselves progressively at a series of early states, trying to use national resources to convince a small group of localized voters to cast ballots for their chosen candidate. The value of those votes is directly proportional to our willingness to believe that those votes represent some reality that is meaningful in determining America’s choice for presidential candidates.
If we believe that Joe Biden’s failure to get over the 15% threshold in those Iowa caucus precincts means that he is not a viable candidate, he is not a viable candidate and thus drops out. If we believe that Rudolph Giuliani’s sixth and fourth place showings are OK because he did not “try to win” in Iowa and New Hampshire (all the money he spent in New Hampshire notwithstanding), he is still in the running. At the same time, if we believe that a pair of fifth place finishes for Ron Paul is proof that he is on the lunatic fringe (in spite of the fact that he has garnered nearly 5,000 more actual votes than Giuliani at this point), then he is on the lunatic fringe. It is a fascinating exercise in building (and tearing down) castles from thin air.
We could do all of this without the actual voters or the election night rallies and speeches. They are, in some respects, utterly superfluous to the actual dynamics of the race. Next week, Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic front-runner, not because of what New Hampshire voters did but because of what we have decided her “win” “means.” We could get this whole experience just by reading the columnists and the daily polling reports, but then again, they have their own problems with fuzzy math.