First, most of the different organizations who have ben preparing various counts are reporting numbers that are often little more than extrapolated from non-final data at the district level (witness how the numbers shifted in California some six weeks after their primary).

Second, virtually everyone reports on "pledged delegate" allocations from the caucus states, even though the actual delegate selection and apportionment often doesn't take place until well later, after several other layers of county/district and state conventions.  Again, we've already seen this in Texas, for example, and Iowa doesn't conclude its process until the state convention on June 14, so we won't know who "really" won that state until then!

That was the way we used to do it - Candidate X needs Y many delegates to reach the Magic Number and claim victory!

So the Magic Number is no longer with us and instead we spend time endlessly parsing delegate counts.  Or the polls.  Or electability.

Nor did he focus so much on the extra delegate but instead on "the real strength statewide," the importance of which still escapes me frankly.

The argument went like this:

1. The reason Obama got one more delegate is that he did well in the rural counties, which Nevada weighs more heavily.

2. Thus, Obama's delegate win is not some sort of affront to democracy, but rather a positive since it illustrates his ability to gain support in areas where Democrats need to make headway.

After Obama carried Missouri by running up big margins in the handful of counties which Democrats traditionally win, while Clinton carried something like 110 out of 115 counties overall, you stopped hearing Obama argue that it's important to look at who won the rural areas.

The Obama camp did score on that, big time. Then they got the Media to define the race to be about "change," and race, and about a lot of vague generalizations. Instead of the race being about Democratic principles, like fairness and economic justice, and experience, and ideas that work.

Why? Because, by massive margins, the American people in general (57%-26%), and Democrats in particular (59%-25%) think that the popular vote count is more critical, as revealed in this poll.

You don't get around numbers like those. When the end of the primary season arrives, if Hillary is by the most reasonable reckoning ahead in the popular vote, she will have a far more powerful case for her legitimacy than Obama.

If they were all supposed to vote for the pledged delegate leader, then we should just nominate the leader.

But that's not how it's supposed to work.

Yes I know about the MA folks, and others too.

We have an established and accepted delegate system, where some states* chose a caucus because everybody understood that running up the popular vote was of zero importance to the nomination process.  Now we are told that the popular vote should be important, so the voters of caucus states with low (or no publicly known) participation numbers will be retroactively assesd a penalty of reduced influence even though, in fact because, they followed the rules.

When Did The Pledged Delegate Count Become The Holy Grail? How The Obama Camp and NBC Made It So

As soon as the Obama Support Networks saw that is the ONLY metrics they can beat they went for it ...

I think given so much anti-Hillary bias, I give her credit that now ever one has at least in public conceded that SD's should vote an independent judgement

Tuesday night, Williams reported that the caucus totals from Texas had been counted and, as a result, Obama was awarded more delgates than Clinton.

Then he looked straight into the monitor and said, "That means, Obama won Texas."

I havent heard this from anyone, or seen this any other place since. But there, in living color, was Williams declaring Obama the winner of the Texas primary by delegate count.

And indeed, if you saw the same focus on Super Delegates counts would you please point them out to me?

I believe it was their entrenched bias against Clinton that made them so eager to take Obama's word for everything. Everything her camp said was caveated with 'of course they are saying that', with the blogosphere adding 'and we hate Mark Penn'.

What you are arguing here is just a continuation of what you argued yesterday, and it is a clever one I admit. You are trying to undercut the importance of the pledged delegate count in order to inflate the importance of the popular vote as a rule of decision for super delegates. In order to get there, though, you have to ignore the results of the caucus states because they don't fit into your popular vote schema.

I suppose it's possible that your rationale might be persuasive to a few superdelegates, but I certainly hope its reach goes no farther than that.

To my mind the obligation of a superdelegate is to to take into account the will of his or her state in selecting a nominee and to take into account issues of electability in the general election. No superdelegate is bound by either metric. But his or her vote must sell to the rank and file democratic party member or voter that is leaning toward the democratic party this year.

General Electric has long had an agenda in American politics.

It's the only major news media company that makes the bulk of its money outside of media.

Viacom, Time-Warner, Disney, and even Fox make their money from various media.

Freedom of the press belongs to whoever owns the press.

BTD is right. WAY.

Obama's message is going flat.

America will wake-up in time to make this happen.

Dean won't.

All of a sudden a majority of delegates is supposed to be what will decide who should be the nominee.

He has been driving the subject's divisions, paradoxically calling himself the unity and hope candidate. I've said this over and over.  

His people are ALL over the blogs and hardly any for Hillary. Imagine all the cash to the blogs.

Frankly, I don't care if the media didn't get that story immediately.  The media getting something wrong isn't exactly newsworthy anymore, because it happens with such frequency.

The DNC procedures allow for a minimum standard that has to be followed.  State nominating contests must occur within a certain window of time and adhere to some basic rules, but beyond these basic rules, the states set up their own processes.  Some states run primaries, some states run caucuses, and Texas runs a combination of these.  Michigan set up internet voting for their caucuses in 2004.  So long as your contest adheres to the bare minimum standards laid out by the DNC, the state level party has control over how they'd like to run their contest.

Because of this freedom, there has to be an underlying mechanism to all this.  How do you add up, OK, won a caucus in Iowa, 2nd in a primary in New Hampshire, lost in one part of Texas' system and won in another?  The answer is provided for us: pledged delegates.  All contests assign pledged delegates.  That's the mechanism that determines who won an individual contest, and who's winning the combination of those contests.

If you dislike this system, the time to complain was when the rules were being devised.  That's when there was a period for debate and discussion of those topics.  And if it doesn't go your way, there'll be another opportunity when the rules for 2012 are drawn up.  But once the rules are set, those are the rules for the contest.  They've been laid out for all to see, and all to study.  that is how the contest will be run.

The contest is about delegates.  Not popular votes, or states won, or primaries won, or caucuses won, or money raised, or the number of blue shoes you can sneak into campaign ads, or the number of balloons you can drop on an audience, or any other criteria you can come up with.  

The Presidential contest is based on electoral votes.  I don't care that Al Gore won the popular vote, the popular vote doesn't determine who wins and becomes President, the electoral college does, and Al Gore did not win there.  I thought the argument over this was illogical then, and it remains so to this day.  If you want electoral reform, I'm on board with that, and we can change the system going forward, but we're not going to change the rules after the game has begun.

And given that the contest is about delegates, and the real question coming out of any of these primary contests is "what was the people's will, as expressed within the rules of the contest?", the number that matters is the pledged delegates, disregarding the superdelegates, who are within their rights to hold a press conference with a monkey throwing darts to decide who they'll vote for.

Pledged delegates is the key.  It's always been the key.  And if the media isn't smart enough to have figured that out on the night of Iowa, it's unfortunate, but it's certainly not the work of some Vast Independent Conspiracy colluding with the news media.

Obama won Texas.  Obama won Nevada.  New Hampshire and Missouri are ties.  Obama took the lead in Iowa, and hasn't relinquished it since.  If you're so obsessed with winning and losing that you need it to be one or the other, and the news media often is, then we'll go to another criteria where we can compare these, and you get that Clinton won New Hampshire and Obama won Missouri using the popular vote as a tiebreaker.

Just because you're losing in the count that matters doesn't mean you can redefine the rules, which is precisely which this is an attempt at.

In the end, I don't think it'll matter.  Obama will end the primary ahead in pledged delegates, and Hillary won't be able to dig herself out of the 700,000+(really somewhere in the range of >800,000 but we'll never know those caucus numbers for sure) vote deficit she's got herself into now.  That'll leave Obama ahead in pledged delegates, total popular vote, states won, primaries won, primary popular vote, caucuses won, and basically any other major statistical category you can get into.