What If Michigan Had Voted Within The Rules?

« The View From Your Window | Main | Stu Taylor On California »

24 May 2008 02:04 pm

Poblano uses his very powerful demographic model to hazard a guess about how the delegates would have spread if Michigan hadn't broken the rules and had a regular primary:

Overall, we project that Obama would have carried Michigan by a narrow margin -- about 4.0 percentage points or 80,000 votes. After accounting for delegates awarded at the statewide level, we project him to win 65 Michigan delegates to Clinton's 63. Certainly, there is some margin for error in these calculations, and Clinton could certainly have won the state herself. But it would undoubtedly have been very close. Interestingly, if you take the average of the winning margins in Indiana (Clinton by 1.2 points), Ohio (Clinton by 8.7) and Wisconsin (Obama by 17.3), you come up with an average of Obama by 2.5 points, which is very close to our estimate.

The idea that Obama should get zero delegates from Michigan - and that this represent a triumph of democracy - is cuckoo for cocopuffs.

Permalink :: Trackback (0) :: Sphere It! ::