Clinton Supporters Who Say They'll Vote for McCain: Where Are They From?
I've seen about 4 or 5 youtubes of Clinton supporters who are so they angry they say they'll vote for McCain, and all but one of them are from New York -- which makes sense, of course. But I wonder if anyone has looked at whether this is representative of Clinton's most impassioned "McCainocrat" supporters. And if it is, is anyone really worried that New York will go Republican in the general election?
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No.
June 1, 2008 12:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Are they hysterical tirades like the "Why don't you leave Brittney alone" guy?
June 1, 2008 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Over the past week I've seen one post and some other comments that make me suspect at least a good percentage of the most vitriolic and vocal may be GOP operatives. I cannot find the post but the guy had done the kind of web searching I have no real understanding of other than I know it can be done and have seen it. He traced the owner of the Hillaryis44 site to a known, male GOP fundraiser type.
In analysing the comment sources he identified around 300 individual posters for that site as opposed to close to 9000 for Taylor Marsh (I'm pretty sure). I'm not sure how to estimate the number of actual commenters on these sites, or to know how many are truly Dems. No Quarter probably has the lowest % of strong Dems. But if it is 10,000 each, we are probably talking 100,000 who are distorting the disagreements and the extent of Dem voters who are stupid enough to vote McCain.
Conversely, we know what percentage the AA vote is and that the perception of being cheated out of this race would be justified.(If for no other reason than a newbie ran a national campaign first time out with such overwhelming success). We can't calculate the number of white people like me who would also feel that the Dems had done the STUPIDEST nomination in its history.
The problem with this group is the Dems will still get the votes in '08. But watch out for the Greens getting a lot stronger and, in the GOP collapse, a viable party over the next 10 - 20 years.
June 1, 2008 1:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
'Does it not even occur to you that there exist exactly symmetric arguments with respect to the "unfairness" of a nominee being selected when they lost the popular vote, rather than losing the pledged delegate count?
It's not 100% clear whether Hillary will win the popular vote in the end -- PR has yet to weigh in, and can affect the outcome of the popular vote question. If, as many suspect, PR goes toward Hillary in a major way, Hillary will almost certainly win the popular vote on virtually every reasonable way of counting it -- without, for example, including MI into the mix in any fashion.
In that case, isn't it obvious that many Hillary supporters will feel, quite reasonably, that she wins the "moral argument" for being selected nominee? And even if you don't credit that point of view, I don't see how anyone can simply dismiss the polling that shows that the people at large pretty massively favor the popular vote -- and dismiss the pledged delegate count -- as the best metric superdelegates might adhere to in choosing the nominee.
57% Say Candidate With Most Votes Should Get Nomination
Whatever problems might exist in how the popular vote is counted pale by comparison to the public's perception that the pledged delegate count is inherently defective as a metric.
Now, I should think that "legitimacy" is mostly in the eyes of the public. I should think that these polls make it pretty clear that the popular vote is, in their eyes, a vastly better metric than the pledged delegate count. (I mean, Obama lost the popular vote both in NV and TX, and yet wins more delegates? Could you have a more obvious demonstration of how arbitrary and irrational the pledged delegate count is?)
But in any case, what's pretty obvious is that acting as if there is not a quite good case to be made by Hillary supporters that they have been "robbed" if Hillary loses the nomination while winning the popular vote -- not to mention having a vastly better argument for electability than Obama -- is hardly the work of someone who might have a right to claim anything like objectivity in their thinking.'
June 1, 2008 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Again: she did not win the Popular Vote!!
Extrapolating some numbers, we can ballpark a figure for the Popular Vote in caucus states too.
In your Popular Vote "counting" you are excluding those states.
Earlier in the race Hillary repeated often that the winning metric was based on the "delegates," when she couldn't win that she started inventing other metrics.
She doesn't get to make up the rules and neither do you.
June 1, 2008 3:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Ballpark a figure"? You mean "Make up a figure" don't you? The popular vote count is made up from those who voted. There's no need to extrapolate on how many people might have voted for each in a caucus state. The number that voted is the number that voted. It's pretty simple.
June 2, 2008 1:42 PM | Reply | Permalink