Mar. 11

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News from the Votemaster

If you are looking for the "Experience vs. Greatness" story, it is now happily living on the Data galore page, which is listed under the map every day.

Mississippi has a primary today. The odds favor Barack Obama as the state has many black Democrats.

The Democrats have a Senate candidate in Minnesota: comedian Al Franken. His primary opponent dropped out. Could a comedian be elected senator in a state that already elected a professional wrestler as governor? It could. He has been campaigning like crazy and raising tons of money, as well as cracking jokes about his opponent, Sen. Norm Coleman like: "I'm the only New York Jew in this race who actually grew up in Minnesota." (Coleman grew up in Brooklyn.)

Quite a few people have asked what would have happened if the Democrats had used a statewide winner-take-all rule. In other words, suppose the statewide winner got all the delegates. Where would be be now? Here is the answer. The calculation assumes Clinton won Nevada and Texas. She got more votes in Nevada but fewer delegates (by 1). She also won the popular vote in the Texas primary. The caucus results are still not in but preliminary tallies suggest Obama may end up with more delegates. If you want to award Texas to Obama, the arithmetic is pretty simple.

Hillary Clinton would have 1746 delegates to Barack Obama's 1569. The reason the Democrats don't have a winner-take-all rule is because they are Democrats. They don't consider it fair that the birthday boy or girl gets to eat the whole cake. You have to share it with your friends. Republicans have a different world model. You either win or you lose. If you win you get to take all the marbles home. If you lose, you get no marbles. Try harder next time. (Well, mostly, some GOP primaries are winner-take-all by congressional district or something else.) If the Democrats had employed winner take all but for only 80% of the delegates leaving 20% for the PLEOs, the score now would be Clinton 1397, Obama 1255. If you want the data in .csv format, here it is. Please DON'T ask what would happen if the Republicans did proportional representation by state senate district everywhere. If you want the popular vote data, it is on the NY Times Website.

Alan Abramowitz, a professor of politican science at Emory University has an interesting posting over at Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball. Abramowitz analyzed the 2006 exit polls and concluded that the defection of moderate to liberal Republicans cost the GOP their Senate and House majorities. These were voters who normally vote Republican but who were fed up with George Bush. Another ominous sign is the large number of Republicans who voted in the Democratic primaries this year (25% in Wisconsin), largely for Barack Obama and the tiny number of Democrats (2-3%) who voted in the Republican primaries. The message here is that Obama will pull Republicans away from McCain but McCain won't pull Democrats away from Obama. With Clinton, party loyalty becomes stronger.

Here are today's new polls.

The polling results for all states are available as a Web page and in .csv format.

Here are the delegate totals from various news sources rounded to integers (Democrats Abroad has 22 delegates, each with 1/2 vote). The sources differ because in most caucus states, no delegates to the national conventions have been chosen yet, just delegates to the district, county, or state convention. Also, all sources try to count the PLEOs (Party Leaders and Elected Officials) and unpledged delegates, who also get to vote at the convention. When different reporters call a PLEO and hear "Well, I like Hillary, but Barack has his charms too" they may score it differently.

Delegates

Needed to win: Democrats 2025, Republicans 1191.

Here is another source for delegate totals.

WWW www.electoral-vote.com