Today’s the big day. WaPo provides a bit of background.
One argument people are making for disregarding the FL and MI outcomes is that a lot of people are said to have not voted because they knew the primary wouldn’t count.
In the case of Michigan, that seems pretty indisputable: turnout was way low, especially by the standards of this primary season.
Eric Kleefeld of TPM tries to make a similar case for Florida, but I just don’t see a smoking gun. He shows a graph comparing D v. R turnout in the primaries this year, with Kerry v. Bush voting in 2004. MI is visibly an outlier, but FL, not so much. It’s on the edge of the cluster, but it still looks like part of the cluster.
I looked at it another way - I looked at Dem primary votes as a percentage of Dem registration in closed primaries, since FL was closed. I didn’t look at many, because registration stats were often hard to come by, but here’s what I found:
FL Dem votes/registration: 1.75M/3.83M = 45.7%
PA Dem votes/registration: 2.31M/4.20M = 55.0%
MD Dem votes/registration: 0.88M/1.73M = 50.9%
OK Dem votes/registration: 0.42M/1.04M = 40.4%
Oklahoma may be a bit of a special case, since Dems still have something like a 5-4 registration advantage in the state, despite its being one of the most reliably GOP states nowadays. A lot of those 1.04 million probably skipped the primary because they weren’t really Dems anymore.
Pennsylvania may be a bit of a special case too, because it was the sole focus of both campaigns for six solid weeks. You’d expect higher turnout.
OTOH, FL also has its share of ‘legacy’ Dems who are really Republicans (some of them are my in-laws), so FL’s figures also might be artificially low on account of that. And even aside from that, FL’s 45.7% participation rate isn’t that much lower than MD’s 50.9%.
So I think claiming substantially reduced FL turnout due to the unofficial status of the primary is going out on a rather weak limb, unless there’s a better argument out there that I haven’t seen.
So let’s recap.
DNC lawyers says that half-delegations (either half votes or half-sized) is the least punishment required by the rules. Obama has an “operational majority” of the committee but obviously wants this done in a way that simultaneously makes the Michigan and Florida delegations happy and allows him to complete his GE pivot. Of the 36 “uncommitted” pledged MI delegates at least 22 plan on throwing their support to Obama anyway. There is no chance that an overwhelming number of supers are going to suddenly switch to Hillary on the basis of this committee’s determination and even some of Hillary’s most ardent supporters really do not want to see this go to the convention.
So it seems like half votes for both states, and Obama can even afford to let the results otherwise stand as is. Even that cinches the new pledged delegate majority and, depending on if supers get halved too or not, only 82.5 to 91 from an absolute majority. Figure 36 pledged delegates minimum from the remaining primaries and the top end is that only 55 supers of 235.5 (supers full) left need to declare with or without pressure from Pelosi and Reid to get there.
In the end the RBC is not going to seat the delegations as is. It would open a pandoras box too large for future campaigns. Both candidates know this, yet only one appears to care. Is Clinton asking for full seating no questions asked? Or is she OK with half votes? IIRC, She wants a full seating…I highly, highly doubt that’s going to happen.
Watch the demonstrators that the Clinton camp have bussed in try to rush the place. Watch a bunch of older white women in Hillary tee shirts be dragged screaming into custody by the police. Watch some Republican operatives in Obama tee shirts try to start a riot.
Watch the media cream their jeans.
Watch Katherine Harris bum-rush the place with a McCain Bikini shouting "Down with democratic swine!!!
Thanks - now I’ve got to Clorox my brain.
The WaPo has a live feed of the proceedings from its main page.
Try here or here, or go to the main washingtonpost.com page, and look for the live-feed link.
Right now, some woman from Florida is emotionally speechifying. Yawwn.
OK, the state chair of MI is requesting the delegates be seated at full strength with 69 to Clinton, 59 to Obama. There are a number of arguments challenging this, but no one is mentioning the fact that MI illegally (wrt the National DNC) held their primary early! The state chair claims that MI has been punished enough, citing among other things that MI voters have been deprived of the direct mail, phone calls, advertisements, etc. Personally, I would consider that a reward!
OK, now someone is actually questioning the right of the committee to allocate votes.
The part of this that’s killing me is the bald-faced assertion that simply counting the results of a mock election gives the constituencies of those states a voice… as if you can run a mock election, decide later that it’ll count, and have reliable results. I wouldn’t mind a little less politicking and a little more candor, like, hey, we messed up, and we know that anything we do at this point is utter bullshit.
CNN has this story up about Clinton’s chief lawyer.
The part that really gets me is here:
He shouldn’t get any delegates because HE FOLLOWED THE RULES? Seriously, what is going on with these people?
Are they going to the GWB School of Negotiation?
Interesting. The Committee seems to be slightly tilted towards Clinton, while the audience seems slightly tilted towards Obama. Neither tilt is terribly strong, but they seem to be there.
Ben Sargent nails!
Does anybody know when they’ll vote?
I can tell you this – I’d rather have the people arguing for Obama filling cabinet posts than the people arguing for Clinton.
Was there a rule about putting or not putting your name on the ballot in MI?
Is this the same committee that existed when the rules were drawn up? IIRC, that committee had more Clinton people on it than Obama people.
The DNC requested that all candidates remove their names from the MI ballot (a FL state law prevented the request there).
Every candidate did except for Kucinich (I don’t know why he didn’t) and Hilary (who claimed a “clerical error” prevented her from filing the paperwork in time).
This whole process makes me sick…
They’re so full of shit, sitting there arguing about how they actually give a flying fuck about voters in Florida in Michigan. If early states had been Wisconsin and Virginia, the argument would be reversed. Hillary can’t win fairly, so that’s why she’s pretending to care about FL and MI.
And I get the feeling we’re going to be treated to 3 more months of this shit.
I’m going to go ahead and cast a shadow of doubt on threee more months of bullshit. Clinton’s return to congress is already tainted, I highly doubt she will continue that blindly for another 3 months. I’m going to expect by Friday, maybe ven thursday next week she will conceed.
Ah, the dreaded “clerical error”. :smack: