I wonder why?

And that power being is the vote.  Clealy HRC has the advantage bar NONE.

Of course I'm fine with some reasonable compromise as long as there is no vote stealing. And really, just seating the uncommitted delegates in MI and uncommitted (SD's in other words) should be fine by the Obama camp.

This isn't to say that the pledged delegates he won during that time are any less legitimate. They're his, without question. But the fact remains that he didn't win enough pledged delegates to secure the nomination, so it becomes a metric (and an important one) for the supers to use. But there's no question that Obama has been coasting on the lead he earned in February, and since then it's been pretty much all Clinton, including burying him in the Philadelphia debate.

Delegates earned in caucuses count just as much as any other, and they represent an ability to organize the caucus effort, which is important. But to claim that caucus delegates in any way represent "the will of the people" is just fallacious. And this isn't just an opinion. The results from Texas and Washington, among others, provide clear evidence of the disparity between caucus results and the will of the people. If the supers want to use the pledged delegate lead as their only metric, then they'll support Obama. But if they really want to look at electability, there's a significant argument for Clinton.

It's only fair to count their votes, and their caucus system is winner take all.

Yeah Hilary won my state big time and I know I should follow the will of the people of my state by picking her and I also know that she is the better candidate overall to win the GE but if I vote for her I will look like a racist.

Six states moved their primaries up in defiance of the rulz: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, Florida, and Michigan; right?

It doesn't matter why he took his name off the ballot, because in the end, what it meant was that he - he, Senator Obama, the Man of the People, THE ONE, the Shining Light of Unity - made a strategic decision to take away the voters's choice to vote for him; if any one was doing any disenfranchising, it was first, the DNC for exacting such a draconian punishment, and second, it was Barack Obama and the others who voluntarily took their names off the ballot, leaving those voters who may have wanted to vote for them (note the use of the word "them;" Obama was not the only one who came off the ballot) no choice except not to vote, or to vote uncommitted.

There is no way to know who would have voted for the missing candidates - exit polls are still polls and there is no way to verify those results.

It seems to me that when a voter chooses to vote "uncommitted," he or she knows that his or her vote is not going to end up in a particular candidate's totals.

If Barack Obama really wanted the votes - if he cared about making sure the people of Michigan who voted in the Democratic primary had an opportunity to be part of the process, he would have agreed to a re-vote - but he didn't.  He would have agreed that it was unprecedented to allow people who cast legitimate votes for Republican candidates in the original primary to be able to cast another vote in a do-over for any other candidate.

The problem is that we have this proportional system where you can split delegates even where there is a 59-41 voting spit.  Or you give more delegates to places where the turnout has been better in year's past.  It is a stupid and corrupt system.

Oh, and an electability update:

Florida (Rasmussen)

Obama 40, McCain 50

The arguments used by the die hard Hillary supporters that frequent this site to twist the numbers into your candidate's favor are just plain dumbfounding.  

This is the sort of twisted, tortured data you want to use to make a case for Hillary being "ahead" in the popular count? Which, by the way, is a completely bogus metric in how we pick our candidates.

Changing the rules, and the "criteria for winning"...this has been done by the Clinton camp what...four, five, six times now?

When people know that their vote doesn't matter then they don't vote.  I live in Washington and voted in the Democratic caucus and not the primary because no delegates were based on the primary.  Also, any statements that try to compare the democratic caucus and primary are ridiculous because people didn't vote because a vote in the primary didn't matter (I am not going to waste my time voting in something that doesn't matter).

I am a Obama supporter and I think that Michigan and Florida should have had an election that counts (although now we know it wouldn't matter because it comes down to the superdelegates anyways) but trying to count votes from elections where the electorate knew and fully believed their vote didn't count is ridiculous.  

This is obviously a fallacious assumption.  Exit polling suggests about 70 percent of the "uncommitted" voters would have voted for him had his name been on the ballot(and we'll leave aside all the voters in FL and MI who stayed home because they were informed the results wouldn't count), which works out to about 170,000 voters.

Factor that into the "popular vote metric" on the RCP site, and Obama leads by about 110,000.

If you're going to make the "popular vote" argument, you should go with a measurement that is as inclusive as possible.  Not estimating the proportion of uncommitted voters in MI who would have voted for Obama is by definition an act of exclusion.

If we accept that voters matter, we have:

63,825 Hillary + 173,664 Obama = 109,839 Obama

If we accept that rules and technicalities matter, we have:

For completeness, I'm prepared to dig out actual but unofficial counts for ME and IA caucuses ... and I believe such counts can also be retrieved for Nevada. Only Texas first-level caucuses defied all attempts to count heads. Even the best unofficial tabulations were incomplete and diverged by several percentage points.

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Leaders in both states were warned repeatedly that continued defiance of the DNC could result in at least 50 percent or even 100 percent of any delegates awarded from a primary held in violation of the calendar being "stripped," i.e., excluded from voting at the convention. Not quite believing that the DNC would follow through, neither budged. Then, on August 25, 2007, the RBC found Florida in noncompliance of its rules. The state was given thirty days to amend its decision, but again did nothing. Since other states were at the time angling to get in on the early voting--you may recall that Iowa and New Hampshire threatened to move theirs to December 2007 in order to remain first--the RBC decided to make an example of Florida. It ruled that all its elected delegates would be voided. The vote of the thirty-member committee had only one dissent.[3] Florida could go ahead with a primary if it wished, but its voting would constitute a mere "beauty contest"; as far as the DNC was concerned, it would be as if the Florida primary didn't exist. Florida sued in a federal court and lost. The same process ensued later with respect to Michigan.

So with respect to Florida, everyone knew by the end of Septemeber, that Florida's delegates would be voided and that the election would be illegitimate...Clinton knew this and agreed as all other candidates did...

After this, there is nothing that can legitimize the Florida election...the delegates are off the table...Obama's national ad buy or Clinton's multiple fundraisers or whatever else happened on behalf of the candidates is irrelevant...for Obama's ad buy to constitute an advantage Florida's election would first need to be a legitimate election...all candidates agreed beforehand that it would not, in accordance with the RBC.

Clinton may very well end up with a popular vote lead but the penalty of stripped delegates underscores the fact that DELEGATES will be the metric by which the nominee is determined, as the Obama camp has explained repeately to all who would listen...

The Michigan debacle is something else entirely...the only viable candidate on the ballot states on Oct. 11 2007, that "It's clear, this election they're having is not going to count for anything," Clinton said Thursday during an interview on New Hampshire Public Radio's call-in program.

But in March 13, 2008 NPR finds Hillary contradicting herself on Michigan stating that "We all had a choice as to whether or not to participate in what was going to be a primary, and most people took their name off the ballot but I didn't."[23] Critics have labeled Clinton's actions as dishonest, and charged her with trying retroactively to change the rules for her own benefit.[24][25][26]

This directly contradicts her Sept. 1, 2007 pledge to not campaign or PARTICIPATE in the Michigan primary...so a pledge made in good faith beforehand becomes a choice for candidates in a free-for-all?...this is simply dishonest and nearly 6 in 10 Democrats feel she is exactly that...

a primary contested between a singular viable candidate versus Gravel, Dodd (who dropped from the race after Iowa), Kucinich (who tried but failed to remove his name from the ballot also), uncommitted and write-in...how this can be considered fair and legitimate is beyond me...again, if all parties knew beforehand the decision to strip Michigan on Dec. 1 2007, how can this election be seen as legitimate?

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All of the Democratic campaigns were notified that Florida and Michigan would not count. As far as is known, none protested at the time. On August 31, all campaigns received a letter from various officials in the four early-voting states asking them to sign a pledge not to campaign in Florida and Michigan. Within a day, all campaigns agreed. Patti Solis Doyle, the recently fired Clinton campaign manager, said at the time: