Legal Commentary

Revised Caucus v. Primary Report: Thread Two

By Jeralyn

This is an update to this morning's post about Peniel Cronin's latest report on the caucus vs. primary results in the Democratic presidential nomination race.

I sent her some questions I received from readers. She answers that her notes and figures are correct. However, to make it easier for readers to discern the difference in what she is saying, she has modified some of the wording in the footnotes.

The revised report is here. (The original report is here.)She adds: [More...]

All caucus state votes have been included in my report. The 4 caucus states that have not officially reported their turnout/votes number are ME, NV, IA and WA. However, like realclearpolitics.com and others, I have done the research to estimate those numbers based on state Democratic Party turnout numbers and percentages of votes cast for Obama versus Clinton. Realclearpolitics has an estimate of Obama + 110,222 votes for those 4 caucuses. My estimate is Obama + 110,027 votes for those same 4 caucuses. A total difference of 195 votes between the RCP estimate and mine.

All of the data and information in the report is objective. I did not want to prepare a serious caucus versus primary study and then contaminate it with biased data.

For instance, I show Clinton’s vote lead in the 37 Primaries in two ways: Clinton + 502,941 without any MI votes to Obama; and Clinton + 324,315 reflecting 75% of the MI “Uncommitted” votes awarded to Obama. According to the Levin work group proposal reported at the DNC’s RBC meeting on May 31, exit polls showed Obama receiving 75% of the “Uncommitted” votes and John Edwards receiving 25%.

When people read the information carefully, they will see that I’ve made every attempt to be fair to Obama.

Again, please check out Ms. Cronin's important and groundbreaking work on this topic.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 02, 2008 (boomark / email).