Why Count Only 50% of Florida's Delegates? To Keep the Magic Number Lower, Perhaps?

by Deb Cupples | The Democratic Party and Barack Obama's campaign have been fixating on the concept of "party unity."  Basically, they want Hillary supporters to happily jump on Obama's bandwagon so he'll have a chance to beat McCain in November (if Obama is the nominee -- yeah, I know it's likely but it hasn't happened yet).

I think the unity ship blew up before it even had a chance to sail, partly because a Democratic candidate (Obama) fought to reduce the vote strength of the 2+ million Democratic voters who turned out in Florida and Michigan.

While watching the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee hearing on Saturday, I kept wondering why Obama's campaign representative -- Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida -- kept insisting on counting only 50% of his (and my) state's primary votes.

As I explained here, Florida's Republicans (not Democrats) were responsible for moving the primary election to a date earlier than the rules allowed: that and DNC rules allowed the RBC to not strip any delegates of a state whose Dems acted in good faith to stop the primary from moving to an un-allowable date.  In short, Wexler had a good argument for not stripping any of Florida's delegates.

The proportional effect would have been the same whether 100% or 50% of Florida's votes were counted.  That and Obama's pledged-delegate lead would have withstood the counting of all 211 of Florida's delegates.

Keep in mind that Florida is the nation's fourth largest state (27 electoral votes) and is a swing state.  After eight years of Jeb Bush (and his brother in Washington), we Floridians were ripe to fall into Democrats' hands in November -- before Florida's vote got cut in half.

Obama took at least three risks when publicly fighting to reduce the strength of Florida's vote by half:

1) Alienating enough Florida Dems to gift-wrap the state for John McCain in November

2) Alienating enough Hillary supporters in other states to lose support in November if

3) Inspiring questions about the legitimacy of Obama as the nominee.

The big question: why was Obama's campaign willing to take those risks -- especially given his delegate lead?

No answer came as I pondered the question.  Later, while I was thinking about something else, an answer came:  maybe it was all about keeping the magic number as low as possible, so Obama would have a better chance of quickly getting enough delegates to declare victory.

Before the RBC decided to count only 50% of Florida and Michigan's votes, a Democratic candidate needed about 2026 delegates to clinch the nomination.

After counting only 50% of Florida's and Michigan's votes, the magic number grew to about  2,118 delegates.

If the RBC had chosen to count 100% of Florida's delegates (and only 50% of Michigan's), the magic number would have grown to about 2,170.

From the Obama campaign's perspective, that simply would not do. 

To this day, with only two primaries left (Montana and South Dakota), Obama still hasn't hit the new magic number of 2,118.  Even after Puerto Rico, Obama has only 2076 total delegates (according to CNN). 

Montana and South Dakota have a combined 31 pledged delegates.  Even if Obama were to win every one of them in today's primary, he would have only 2,107 delegates -- leaving him having to convince only 11 super-delegates to commit to him in order to wrap up the nomination.

If the DNC had chosen to count 100% of Florida's delegates, then even if Obama were to win all 31 of Montana's and South Dakota's delegates, he would have to convince 31 super-delegates to quickly commit to him so he could clinch the nomination.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but convincing 31 delegates would likely take longer than convincing 11 -- and 31 would be a low number, because I assumed that Obama would win all of the delegates up from grabs in today's primaries (which likely won't happen).

Maybe he figured he could clinch the nomination in early June, and all the resentful Democratic voters who supported Hillary would simply forget about Obama's fight to disenfranchise Florida by the time November rolled around.

I suppose stranger things have happened, but that one just doesn't seem likely, because voting rights are pretty fundamental.

Obama has been nothing if not impatient about wanting to declare a victory.

Obama's campaign sent out two emails (March 5 and April 14) strongly implying that Hillary should simply drop out of the race -- just move over and let him declare victory.  Was that a sense of entitlement rearing its ugly head?

Obviously, that tactic didn't work (and Hillary kept winning primaries).

Last month, Obama told the press that he would declare victory around May 20.  That was shortly after Hillary beat Obama in Kentucky's primary (65% to 30%).

May 20 came, and Obama didn't declare victory: in part, I suspect, because his delegate count hadn't reached the magic number by that date.

Yes, for months now, Obama has been itching to wrap up this nomination -- even before the final 10 states got a chance to vote.  It's all about the math, his campaign said.

Apparently, math is pretty much all that matters to Obama's campaign.

Obama chose to resist re-votes in Michigan and Florida, and he chose to oppose counting 100% of the votes in those two states.  He also chose to remove his name from Michigan's ballot, which ultimately made fairly counting Michigan's votes very difficult.

That said, I can't help thinking about pots and kettles when Obama's surrogates or supporters accuse Hillary Clinton of wanting to win "at any cost."

Comments

[freadom]

We are 1/2 citizens now. At least that's a step above not being considered members of the union at all. Great post.

[Deb Cupples]

Thanks, Freadom. And you're right about the DNC's having discounted millions of us.