(6/2/2008) Super-delegates, Hillary can't win, even if it was Winner-Take-it-All using the current Electoral Votes System
Winner-take-all number-crunching, Electoral Votes style, by Sam Mishra
It is great that Obama is inching towards becoming the Democratic nominee for the Presidency. However, what I hear is that to compromise with Hillary, the Obama campaign could pay off the $10 million or more in debt that now hangs over the Hillary campaign. Now, that would be a disaster, for the Obama coffers are full thanks to donations from a million plus small-time donors, who also voted for Obama, since contributing to the Hillary campaign and / or voting for her would have been politics as usual.Hillary and Bill Clinton are super-rich, even though they find it harder day by day to sway the super-delegates to their side. Their net worth is to the north of $100 million. It will be politics as usual, if the Hillary campaign managed to get $10 million or more out of the Obama campaign, which contains the sweat and blood of so many Hillary haters. Let Bill pay it off. Why should Obama do it? He is yet to be President; where as Bill has been there, and done that.
Hillary keeps fighting on, for it is the nature of big egos not to accept defeat, and suffer further humiliation and suffering. That, or she genuinely enjoys the human touch of getting to meet the Puerto Ricans and the other not so fortunate people like her. Puerto Rican vote does not count in the Presidential elections in November, so counting that towards the popular vote means nothing much! Also, what amuses me is that when she keeps asserting that she is winning the popular vote, she conveniently ignores the results from the Caucus contests. What is equally amusing is her assertion that instead of split delegates, if it was a winner take all, she would already be the nominee!
Scenario I: Florida and Michigan are split equally: To challenge Hillary's winner take all assertion, what I have done below is use the same number of electoral votes that are granted for each state in the Presidential elections. In the Presidential elections, we have 538 electoral votes, and one needs 270 to win. For those states where Hillary won, she gets all the electoral votes. For those where Obama won, he gets all the votes. For disputed states like Florida and Michigan, or South Dakota and Montana which are yet to vote (this might give an unfair advantage to Hillary, because she is likely to lose there), the electoral votes have been split. With this winner take all scenario I, this is how the state-by-state tabulations look:
Scenario II: Clinton gets Florida: Let's take a second scenario where we give Florida to Clinton. This is similar to Bush winning Florida to gain the presidency --- for neither Obama nor Hillary campaigned there, and people voted for a more recognizable name, i.e., Clinton. In this scenario, Hillary still loses out to Obama by 1 electoral vote. Golly!
So, no matter how you slice it and dice it, Hillary has lost these elections, winner take it all, or proportional delegations. It is now time for the uncommitted super-delegates to vote what the people really want --- Obama as the democratic nominee.
If you feel bad about the above calculations, let me give you one piece of news from California, where I live. Here, the voters are having buyer's remorse, and if the elections are held again, Obama will beat out Hillary as per the latest polls. So that Hillary can exit gracefully, I am not reproducing the spreadsheet yet once again, but you can imagine where the numbers will be, if we subtracted 55 from Hillary, and gave it to Obama, for California!
Super-delegates, it is now time to act, and put the primaries behind us, so that Democrats can get into the white house, the Iraq war can finally end, more Americans can get affordable health-care, and all that good stuff which Obama is promising. Our polls also indicate that McCain will be able to beat Hillary out, but not Obama; please check it out! And oh yes, if he gives Hillary the Secretary of Health (since she has done some real work on this front), it will be politics as usual, albeit to a limited extent. We need change, and that means Hillary can't be part of the Obama ticket as the VP Candidate. And Bill and Hillary must cough up the cash from their hundreds of millions to pay off their campaign debt; it can't come from the contributions of millions of poor Americans who have donated to the Obama campaign expecting radical change, so that politics as usual is hacked at the roots, not trimmed at the twigs.
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