Please stop talking about the "popular vote"
I’m tired of hearing about the “popular vote” in the Democratic nomination. If every state had primaries, it would make sense. But roughly half the states have caucuses—which makes calculating any meaningful popular vote practically impossible.
In Minnesota, Barack Obama won 2/3 of the 214,066 votes cast in the caucus. In Arkansas, Clinton won a comparable margin of the 314,234 votes cast in the primary. The only problem? Minnesota has about twice as many people as Arkansas and a higher percentage of Democrats. Because one state had a caucus and the other had a primary, Clinton came out ahead in the popular vote between the two states. However, if you modify for the size of the state and number of democrats in the state we see that the primary had a turn out about three times greater than the caucus.
Currently Obama has won nearly all of the caucuses, most of them by very wide margins. All of those states are grossly underrepresented in the “popular vote.” Right now, Obama is winning whatever way you count it—but if Hillary manages some improbable eleventh hour surge and gains half a million or so votes, she’ll claim victory in what initially sounds like the most fair metric. The problem is that the metric is intrinsically flawed.
