Calculus - Still Screwing Over America
Few people have fond memories of high school calculus. It was tough, often confusing, and there were times that you weren’t even sure you were looking at the problem correctly. Most were relieved when we got past the class, no matter what the grade. However, calculus has come back with a vengeance, in the form of the 2008 Democratic primary.
Here are the few things we know. Based on pledged delegates, it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to win. Obama needs 77% of the delegates, Clinton needs 94%. Barack Obama has dominated the young and African American vote, Clinton the older and latino vote. Barack Obama has won more states and delegates, including traditional Republican strongholds, but Hillary Clinton has won the big states one would need to win an election. Hillary Clinton has more superdelegates, but Barack Obama, despite what others may say, still has momentum. Barack Obama could take away McCain’s advantage with moderates, but Hillary could compete on the experience question. These are all the well hashed out, constant mantras of both candidates.
However, courtesy of Marie Cocco of RealClearPolitics, there is an additional consideration on the dems side. Ultimately, as much as the dems hate this, the general election will be decided not based on the popular vote, but by the electoral college. To win, you need 270 votes. Obama, as of right now, has 193, Clinton 263. Now granted, Texas would probably not swing Clinton’s way, but what about Obama’s states? In 2004, Kerry lost Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia by 15 points to Bush. These are three states that Obama won. Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, North Dakota, Kansas, and Alaska have not voted for a democrat in a general election since 1964 and are again Obama states. If we make the appropriate deduction, Clinton would have 229 electoral votes, but Obama would have 139.
Now, if neither can win on pledged delegates, which they can’t, Clinton is going to have a hell of an argument. Yes, he has a popular vote, but a) a lot of those votes were garnered in non head-to-head elections, b) at the time of the convention those results are 6 months old and might not reflect the current trends, and c) electability. Winning Idaho is neat and all for the democrats, but if you can’t win California, New York, Florida, and Ohio (which coincidently McCain did win in his primary, and has significant allies there in Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, and Crist) you lose the election.
So at the end of the day, there will be no public mandate (at least in the form of a winning majority), a divergence between the delegate winner (Obama) and the electoral college based winner (Clinton), a challenger waiting in the wings who is not reviled by the general populace (which the dems were kind of counting on), and no clear way to decide.
If you are a democrat, it makes you wistfully long for integrals.
ADDITION: This is a little off topic, but after seeing it I had to add it. The Clinton campaign is now complaining that Obama’s demands for certain Clinton documents and secrecy complaints is a “Ken Starr tactic.” God Bless America. http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0308/Clinton_aide_compares_Obama_to_Ken_Starr.html
Comment by Brian on 6 March 2008 at 12:06 pm:
I find this argument absurd. It would be absolutely ludicrous to assert that Obama would not win New York in the general election just because he didn’t win it in the primary. Primaries are contests among Democrats in which Democrats compete against one another. There is absolutely zero logical connection between who wins a primary state and who wins a general election state. And there are states that each candidate has won that would be essential for a Democrat to win in order to win the general (for Obama, those states include Illinois, Washington, Wisconsin, Vermont, Connecticut, Maryland).
Admittedly the popular vote doesn’t decide the general either, but when you’ve got a series of polls all showing that Barack Obama does better against John McCain than Hillary Clinton does against John McCain, and by more than just a couple points, that’s an awfully strong indication that he is more electable. Much, much stronger than this silly “but how do we know he can win New York?!?” argument.
Comment by i <3 calculus on 6 March 2008 at 12:41 pm:
[ ] post has something to do with calculus
[x] post has something to do with arithmetic
[x] i miss calculus
Comment by J. Prescott on 6 March 2008 at 12:57 pm:
Brian, I am not saying that because he lost New York in the primary, it is absolutely impossible for him to win the general…but it is an argument, and it is not as impractical as you make it out to be.
And primaries are not just among democrats. California and Texas, off the top of my head, were open primaries, meaning anyone could vote regardless of party affiliation. So the whole, “its just democrats” isn’t necessarily true, especially in the big states which I am talking about.
And you are right the polls, with their infalliblity up to this point in the election cycle, are “much much” more conclusive proof. These polls are all the more trustworthy since McCain has not been running against those two with great intensity up to this point as opposed to Romney and Huckabee, and the fact that the democratic race has been dominating the headlines for the past few weeks, which I am absolutely positive will not change after the primaries. So yes, polls are “much stronger,” what with their smaller sample aspect than primaries, which cover a much larger sample.
And there is some connection to who wins a primary state versus if they win it in a general election. Odds are that if they won the state in the primary, they have a larger group of people already committed to them going into the general, which means they have more people to campaign for them and more people to vote for them. Its not necessarily a slam dunk that those dems who would vote for Hillary in the primary would come out and campaign or vote for Obama in the general, or vice versa. Thats why primary wins are relevant to the general election.
I meant to merely present one additional argument to the others out there. I never intended to say that this argument will win in comparison to Obama’s, merely that it is there. It is not silly, or at least any less pertinent than your “polling” argument. It is probably not enough to win by itself, but it does have some solid points to it. If you could stop guzzling the Obama Kool Aid and at least consider other arguments than those that support Obama, it would be greatly appreciated.
Comment by thetodd on 6 March 2008 at 2:42 pm:
If I’m not mistaken, the point of this “electoral votes” argument is to suggest Clinton is more likely to win the general than Obama is.
The electoral vote approach is OK, but perhaps a simpler and more accurate approach would be to simply compare voter sentiment in the states that could go either way in the general.
Or, if you like markets like me, you can leech off of the work of people who have probably already done this sort of analysis. For each Democratic candidate, P(candidate wins nomination) *P(candidate wins general vs McCain) ~= P(candidate becomes president). Doing this calculation gives both Obama and Clinton around a 64% chance to win the general vs. McCain.
Comment by J. Prescott on 6 March 2008 at 3:07 pm:
Thank you Todd, that is what I was going for. And again, I was not saying that Clinton is definitely more likely to win, just offering a argument that she might be.
And, I don’t doubt your calculation, I am just curious where you are getting your data from to calculate the probability of a win.
Comment by Brian on 6 March 2008 at 3:29 pm:
I don’t really have any non-obvious counterarguments to offer up, and I think Obama has the nomination sufficiently locked up that the whole debate is sort of moot. But on the whole I’ve-been-drinking-the-Obama-Kool-Aid point, I would like to say that it’s not like I don’t think Hillary has ANY legitimate claims to make or that there isn’t room for argument regarding the superdelegates. I just don’t think this particular argument holds any water.
If Hillary were to put together an impressive string of victories going forward but still came up with fewer pledged delegates, I would say she has a legitimate argument to make that the contests Obama won in January and February no longer reflect the current will of the people, and so the superdelegates should turn their support to her.
Similarly, if Hillary were to develop a strong lead in the popular vote while still trailing in the pledged delegate count, she’d have a legitimate argument to make that the superdelegates should follow the voters and not the electoral college-like delegates.
Similarly, if there were clear evidence to indicate that Hillary is more electable against John McCain than Obama, I think she’d have a legitimate argument that the superdelegates should vote what’s in the interest of the party rather than follow the will of the people.
I’m not saying I’d necessarily agree with any or all of those arguments. But I’m just trying to illustrate that it’s not that I’m crazily deluded and think any pro-Hillary/anti-Obama argument is silly and irrational. Just that THIS one is, given that it makes no logical sense.
Comment by thetodd on 6 March 2008 at 4:08 pm:
Elaboration on my calculation for J. Prescott:
Many online betting exchanges and bookies offer odds on who will win the nomination and/or who will win the general election. Check out intrade.com if you want an example of an exchange offering both of these markets.
To simplify the calculation, let’s say Obama is 75% to win the nomination and 50% to win the presidency (these are close to the actual market numbers).
You can then approximately calculate his probability to defeat McCain in a head to head matchup by solving the equation 0.75 * x = 0.5 for x, and you get x = 0.666 (66.6%). This calculation is not exact because it ignores the possibility McCain will not win the nomination (due to death or some other extraordinary circumstance), but it’s close enough. Let me know if you need more elaboration on why that formula works.
Comment by J. Prescott on 6 March 2008 at 4:55 pm:
No, thats about what I figured too. I was just trying to figure out if you had a more exact, empirical number.
Comment by Zap Rowsdower on 7 March 2008 at 10:49 am:
Let it be known…
Rodham is a lock,
and Obama is her tool.
Sometimes, in politics, one has to actually know who the major donors are and who the senior policy advisers are.
Did you know that Axelrod is a long time HRC tool? He was well known in New York for having spent a decade or more working for Hillary and her goons: Vilisak, Schumer, and Spitzer.
Zbrigneiw Brzezinski, General McPeak, Anthony Lake, Sarah Sewall, George Soros. Come on Obamarams, I believe you that you enjoy politics. So…learn about it.
If you folks can’t see through the Clintonian indirect strategy now, you will have trouble for the next 4 years.
And if so, be very afraid. She will not only bring the economy to its knees, but she will hand the white house over to Arnold in 2012.
They call it the “Arnold bill” in Congress, where Spector has nearly enough votes in the Senate, and Rohrbacker had impressive support in the house.
Expect the “McCain born abroad” plot to produce legal opinions and republican sentiment supporting the Arnold amendment.
Getting the ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ Dems to go along for the ride will be easy. Especially with 40M new citizens from the South.