First off, in the interest of disclosure, I'm Canadian and my support of one candidate over another is thus entirely irrelevant. My interest in the US political process is that of a neighbour looking in. Ultimately, whether it's Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, I woud love to see a Democrat become President; perhaps it'll rub off up here and the Canadian left will find its backbone again. More importantly, I would love for the leader of the world's sole superpower to be someone who upholds progressive values. That's why I follow Daily Kos.
That said...
...I do listen to things, and what I've been hearing a lot lately, mostly from the Clinton campaign, is this meme of the national popular vote tally somehow counting as a valid metric in the Democratic primary, be it of victory in the primary or of strength in the general election - because I've heard both. Obviously, it's not. This is not to say that the popular vote is irrelevant, mind; each state has its voice heard, and ultimately the votes in each state translate into delegates. But to crunch the numbers into one big national popular vote is disingenuous at best and blatant libel at the very worst, and not just because Michigan doesn't count. The mechanics of how the prolonged primary system is handled just don't support a national popular vote total that's accurate.
First off, a caucus is not a primary, and trying to tally the popular vote by adding primary turnout to caucus turnout is like trying to finish a puzzle when a third of the pieces come from a separate puzzle altogether. Let's leave aside for a moment the Clinton campaign failing to count popular vote estimates from caucus states, because that's terrain we've ploughed over a thousand times. What I want to focus on is that the popular vote estimates from most of the caucus states are just estimates, because in the end it's delegates that drive a caucus process. A caucus is not a primary, nor a primary a caucus: by its very nature a caucus is not a system that'll draw the same turnout as a primary. It's about conventions and slates of delegates and building the party by bringing activists together, and it's always going to draw less voters simply due to time constraints. Whether this is a better means of selecting a candidate than a primary, I won't comment on; the point is that a caucus is an entirely different process with an entirely different turnout expectation, and as such adding caucus popular vote estimates to primary popular vote totals is unworkable. It's like trying to make a chocolate cake by suddenly adding chicken to the recipe. It makes no sense and shouldn't even be tried. Put another way, how do you count the popular vote in a caucus state when the electoral process inherently tends towards lower turnout and is as much about building the party and engaging in honest debate as it is about selecting a candidate?
Secondly, whether it's a primary or a caucus, the states set their own rules as to whose voice may be heard. Massachusetts' primary is open only to Democrats; North Carolina's is open to independents; in Texas you can vote twice; in Pennsylvania you can vote if you change your registration to Democrat before a certain date; in Washington the primary doesn't count and the caucus is what matters. There are differences in the methods each state uses to determine who has a voice in choosing the party's nominee, and as a result not every primary is equally inclusive. If one is to make the case that the popular vote should count, logically every primary should be run under the same metrics of inclusiveness. If that were the case it would make more sense to count the national popular vote tally as a legitimate metric of victory, but the differences in methodology make this untenable; adding every state assumes the same methodology yet disenfranchises those in any state that does not run under the most inclusive system. That is, if this is supposed to be a nationwide popular vote, why do independents in California get to pick the Democratic nominee, while independents in Massachusetts do not? Why are there different standards for different states if we're assuming that the national popular vote is in any way a tenable metric?
Ultimately each state has its voice in choosing the nominee and its choice of method by which to choose, but the choice of each state is reflected in the delegates it sends to the national convention. Each state has a right to choose its nominee as it sees fit. This is not a national popular vote, it's a collective selection of a nominee to represent fifty states and a handful of territories, and in the end it's the delegates that represent the will of each state.
Thirdly, why are we counting the popular vote in Puerto Rico and the territories in an argument for greater strength in a general election? Personally I'm all for Puerto Rico becoming a state, but for the moment citizens of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and other territories aren't enfranchised to vote in presidential elections. This wasn't such an issue until yesterday, when Hillary Clinton won Puerto Rico in a landslide and immediately added its popular vote to her tally. Why? Are we to believe that Clinton is the stronger candidate because she gets the votes of those who cannot vote for her in the general election? This is not to say that Puerto Rico doesn't matter, but the Clinton campaign is using the popular vote total to claim that she's a stronger general election candidate. It seems to me that using one's strength in a commonwealth that can't vote in the general election to support the argument that one is a better general election candidate is a cognitive dissonance huge enough to warrant its own zip code.
Since I'm fairly sure I've been unclear, my point is this. If the popular vote is to count as a tenable metric for determining the winner of an election, not to mention a means of gauging strength in a general election, then every state should have the same methodology, the same inclusiveness standard, the same rules for registration, and they should probably vote on the same day so that every voter has access to the same information. Territories not enfranchised to vote in a general election should also likely be excluded, as harsh as I feel it is to say that. As it is, the current popular vote math adds caucuses to open primaries to closed primaries to the bizarre Texas Two-Step to disenfranchised territories, and the sum that comes out is essentially an inaccurate monster borne of a ton of diverse methods of deciding whom each state supports as the presidential nominee. Sure, there's a popular vote total, but the methodology gaps make the final numbers flawed at best. The number cannot be trusted to determine the winner of an extended primary, and it certainly can't be assumed to represent strength in a general election, entirely because of these methodological differences.
The only number that matters is the delegate count. In the end, the method each state chooses translates back into delegates; those delegates are the representation of each state's choice of candidate. They're the great leveler designed to translate a dozen or more different systems into something that can be put together and taken to the national convention, and in the end, since the popular vote count cannot be accepted as a perfect number drawn from an election with equal enfranchisement, it's the delegate count that matters. Popular vote by state will differ by methodology, but pledged delegates are pledged delegates, and it's up to the state how they're selected. In the end, it's the pledged delegates that are the truest representation of the will of the states, and it's the pledged delegate count that's the only tenable metric to determine the winner of a primary.
Finally, it might be instructive to look at exactly why the Clinton campaign is pushing the popular vote meme so hard. It's been eight years and the black cloud of the election of 2000 still hangs over us, and the Clinton campaign definitely wants us to think of how Al Gore won the popular vote but ultimately lost the White House. Back then, a lot of people cried foul and questioned the electoral college, and even now it's common wisdom that Gore got screwed. The Clinton campaign is trying to draw an unspoken parallel with that very same situation, presumably in the hopes that the Democratic Party won't dare sanction a repeat of what happened back then. It's a tactic to generate sympathy for the candidate by pushing her as the popular vote winner. I won't speculate as to what end they're doing it, be it to sway the superdelegates or to sabotage the presumptive nominee, but it is a fairly effective argument on an emotional level. It just happens to be mechanically flawed at best and disingenuous at worst. It's apples and oranges. If I were a superdelegate I'd certainly know better than to take the national popular vote tally from fifty-odd different primaries with different methods and standards across a six-month timespan as any indicator of what would happen in a general election with all things equal.
Ultimately it seems as though the primary is settled in all but name. Barack Obama is the clear pledged delegate leader, and accordingly the candidate with the support of the states through the methodology agreed upon. And frankly, it'd be nice to just get on with giving McBush a royal trouncing in the general.