Imagine my surprise when I went to the ABC News website and found the following popular vote totals for the Democratic Party presidential primary:
Barack Obama--13,602,437
Hillary Clinton--13,599,882
Man . . . as Harold Ickes has incessantly repeated: "This thing's as tight as a tick." Except that, it really isn't. At least not in the context that with which the MSM is pushing the back and forth narrative.
As Max Fletcher noted in a thorough article posted today on Open Left, the actual popular vote count currently stands at:
Barack Obama--13,335,159
Hillary Clinton--12,629,468
For those of you counting at home--as I'm sure many of you are as opposed to the MSM; that is a difference of 705,691 votes.
Of course, even the real number only tells part of the story.
The media seems to revel in pushing the Clinton momentum narrative. The fact is, this race has been close, but relatively one-sided since the first contest in Iowa.
The Iowa Caucuses, which now seems like a lifetime ago, occurred roughly two months ago on January 3, 2008. However, more than a million voters had already cast their ballots by that time. I've decided to focus specifically on two states in which there was heavy early voting: FL & CA.
Specifically, I've broken down the vote totals based on available exit polling. Both the FL & CA exits polls delineate votes based on when the individual decided.
For this exercise, I am only counting votes that were cast before the Iowa Caucuses. At this time, Hillary Clinton had a substantial name recognition advantage and was the presumptive nominee [everyone remember the whole coronation strategy?]. The exit polling is divided based on when the voter decided or cast their ballot.
In FL, 49% of the votes were cast before the Iowa Caucuses. The 49% constituted a total of 815,360 votes.
Hillary Clinton won 452,442 of these early votes, which equals 55.5%.
Barack Obama won 273,395 of these early votes, which equals 33.5%.
The total vote differential for Clinton was + 288,167 votes.
For the votes cast prior to the Iowa Caucuses, Clinton was + 179,047 votes.
For the votes cast after Iowa, Clinton was still ahead, but the margin was much narrower: + 109,120 votes.
The CA results are much more striking. I used the same exit polling data to construct the vote margins before and after the Iowas Caucuses.
Note: The FL results, due to the earlier vote, only need to be tabulated for the the votes cast two weeks prior to the primary. On the other hand, the CA results were tabulated from those that voted one month before Super Tuesday. The results are as follows:
Hillary Clinton won 1,109,000 of these early votes, which equals 65%.
Barack Obama won 511,800 of these early votes, which equals 30%.
The differential for Clinton was + 597,200. Clinton won CA by a margin of 416,000 votes. For those individuals that voted after Iowa, Obama garnered roughly 180,000 more votes.
So . . . before the first vote was ever publicly counted on the night of the Iowas Caucuses, Hillary Clinton had a lead of 776,047 votes. That's a three-quarter of a million vote head start. And that only constitutes 2 states in the early vote tabulation.
Based on the prior numbers of Obama holding a lead of 705,691 votes, that means that since we first started publicly counting the votes, and Clinton name recognition became less of a factor, Sen. Obama has garnered almost 1.5 MILLION more votes than Sen. Clinton.
Is that close out of 26 million votes cast? Yes, it is. However, it is not nearly the nip and tuck, "tight as a tick" contest that the media is pushing.
Since the first night of publicly counting votes, this primary has trended in one direction and one direction only. And that direction is prohibitively towards Barack Obama.
Don't allow the MSM to tell you otherwise. And don't allow Sen. Clinton, who is now actively engaged in laying the groundwork to steal this election, succeed in her dizzying spin.
Sen. Barack Obama, by any metric, has earned and will be the Democratic Party nominee and the next President of the United States.
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