Today, over on her "Fact" Hub, Senator Clinton’s campaign is pushing the following spin.
After last night's decisive victory in Pennsylvania, more people have voted for Hillary than any other candidate, including Sen. Obama.
Estimates vary slightly, but according to Real Clear Politics, Hillary has received 15,095,663 votes to Sen. Obama's 14,973,720, a margin of more than 120,000 votes. ABC News reported this morning that "Clinton has pulled ahead of Obama" in the popular vote.
Now, if we head over to the cited figure at RCP, we see that, indeed, if one were to count Michigan and Florida, and one did not count Washington, Iowa, Nevada, and Maine, one would find Senator Clinton in the lead by 120,000 votes. If one counts Washington, Iowa, Nevada, and Maine as well, she still leads, although by very little.
I know that the Clinton campaign is desperately searching for a metric where she can pretend to be winning, but something bothers me here. Senator Clinton doesn’t think my vote counts.
You see, I voted in the Washington State caucuses, in mid-February. I was part of the massive wave of Obama supporters who turned out across the state to give Senator Obama a decisive win. Like Obama supporters in Maine and Iowa, my vote was counted into this process, and I took the time to turn out and vote.
What bothers me is that the Clinton campaign is willing to count Michigan, where Senator Clinton was the only major candidate on the ballot, but won’t count my state, where a fair election was held. Never mind that an honest count puts Senator Obama ahead by about 316,000 votes. Never mind that if one were to only count states that actually held fair elections, Senator Obama would lead by 600,000 votes. Hillary Clinton needed only to continue to use her dishonest metric, but include those caucus states where good Democrats turned out to vote, and she would still be winning her fantasy race.
But she didn’t. Instead, Washingtonians who voted in a fair election matter less to Senator Clinton than Michigan voters who voted in an election where the choice was between her and Undecided (notice, by the way, that when undecideds are counted for Obama, he’s still winning). This is just one more part of the insult 40 states strategy of the Clinton campaign: now, not only do our votes not matter; they don’t even count! This is the number that the Clinton campaign will bandy-about to Super Delegates in an attempt to win this election: and in doing so, she will be disenfranchising me and hundreds of thousands of voters who voted in legitimate elections.
If the Clinton campaign wants to talk about disenfranchisement, they should look to themselves first. Why won’t Hillary Clinton count my vote?