Though Barack Obama has been nominated by the Democratic Party by acclamation, the delegate counts still are tabulated. And I just heard that the final count here in California was 263-169.
FWIW.
...let me update. Apparently it was 273 for Obama, 166 for Clinton, with two superdelegates not voting, one of them DiFi, who isn't here.
...the fact that California was the only state of the ones that went through the roll call that had to pass because they didn't have all the votes cast... well, the word "disorganization" comes to mind. Of course, it's also the largest delegation, so it's maybe understandable.
"I, as you know, have great fondness and great respect for Sen. Clinton and I'm very loyal to her," Feinstein said. "Having said that, I'd like to talk with her and [get] her view on the rest of the race and what the strategy is."
Clinton, who eked out a win in Indiana Tuesday night but lost big to front-runner Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) in North Carolina, has not responded to Feinstein's phone call, the California senator said.
"I think the race is reaching the point now where there are negative dividends from it, in terms of strife within the party," Feinstein said. "I think we need to prevent that as much as we can."
Interesting. What I'd like to see is Feinstein show some leadership on the Rules Committee and block Hans von Spakovsky's resurrected nomination to the FEC. But I'd say DiFi is as good a bellweather as there is of the emerging CW on the Democratic nomination fight.
In other news, California superdelegate Inola Henry committed to Obama today.
Well, I guess it's down to me to take the contrarian view of this whole list purgebusiness.
The short answer is that activists aren't owed seats in Denver just because they're activists. It's perfectly legitimate for the Obama campaign to reward supporters who walked precincts, made phone calls, dropped lit, stayed up late at the campaign office, and generally did anything and everything logistically to help the candidate win California (confidentially, I was told by someone high-up on the campaign last night that they did indeed tie on Election Day; it was the absentees that swung the race to Clinton). Just being a good activist is not enough. You're actually not going to the convention to represent the party, you'd be going as an Obama or Clinton delegate, representing the candidate. Honestly, considering that there were about 1,000 precinct captains in California, if you weren't one, you shouldn't be an Obama delegate. Bottom line.
What I and many of us object to is the haphazard, seemingly random standard applied here, where delegates with little or no ground experience remained on the ballot, while those with a lot didn't (like the guy in CA-36 who was a paid Richardson staffer who remains on the Obama list). Because you're talking about 1,700 delegates, there are lots of arguments you can make for why the campaign chose one candidate or another, but they're all unprovable and contradicted by the group in the next district over. The people still in the race range from bundlers to people who never gave a dime, those who worked their hearts out to those who didn't lift a finger, progressive antiwar activists to those who aren't as vocal. When you're talking about 1,700 for 108 slots, there's not going to be any one reason, and anyone who says otherwise is being extremely myopic. In addition, there are the well-established CDP demographic rules and needs, so compiling a list that will fit those needs is probably a great puzzle. And also, practically everyone on the Obama campaign is in Pennsylvania or North Carolina and Indiana by now, so the vetting process had to be undertaken by a very small number of people.
Well, I guess it's down to me to take the contrarian view of this whole list purgebusiness.
The short answer is that activists aren't owed seats in Denver just because they're activists. It's perfectly legitimate for the Obama campaign to reward supporters who walked precincts, made phone calls, dropped lit, stayed up late at the campaign office, and generally did anything and everything logistically to help the candidate win California (confidentially, I was told by someone high-up on the campaign last night that they did indeed tie on Election Day; it was the absentees that swung the race to Clinton). Just being a good activist is not enough. You're actually not going to the convention to represent the party, you'd be going as an Obama or Clinton delegate, representing the candidate. Honestly, considering that there were about 1,000 precinct captains in California, if you weren't one, you shouldn't be an Obama delegate. Bottom line.
What I and many of us object to is the haphazard, seemingly random standard applied here, where delegates with little or no ground experience remained on the ballot, while those with a lot didn't (like the guy in CA-36 who was a paid Richardson staffer who remains on the Obama list). Because you're talking about 1,700 delegates, there are lots of arguments you can make for why the campaign chose one candidate or another, but they're all unprovable and contradicted by the group in the next district over. The people still in the race range from bundlers to people who never gave a dime, those who worked their hearts out to those who didn't lift a finger, progressive antiwar activists to those who aren't as vocal. When you're talking about 1,700 for 108 slots, there's not going to be any one reason, and anyone who says otherwise is being extremely myopic. In addition, there are the well-established CDP demographic rules and needs, so compiling a list that will fit those needs is probably a great puzzle. And also, practically everyone on the Obama campaign is in Pennsylvania or North Carolina and Indiana by now, so the vetting process had to be undertaken by a very small number of people.
OK, on Saturday the Secretary of State's office released the final official canvass of the vote in California. The statewide numbers are here. The district-level numbers are here. A few notes:
• Turns out that, in final balloting, Hillary Clinton surged to 62.88% of the head-to-head vote in CA-51, giving her a 3-1 split in that district. So the final delegate numbers will be 204-166. So Clinton got 54.4% of the head-to-head vote against Barack Obama, and 55.14% of the delegates.
• The final percentage spread between Clinton and Obama was 8.3%, noticeably lower than previous reports.
• We had over 5 million voters participate in the California Democratic primary. That's 55% of the total votes cast and over SEVENTY-FOUR PERCENT of registered Democratic voters. Wow. Those numbers are here. We also received two million more votes in the Democratic primary than in the Republican primary. The total turnout was the highest ever by raw numbers, and the highest as a percentage of registered voters since 1980, when some guy named Reagan was on the ballot.
You can get to all the numbers from here, a lot of fun stuff in there.
So I'm watching Countdown, and Olbermann brings up the delegate math in the wake of Barack Obama's victory in Mississippi. He teases a discussion with Chuck Todd about "changes in the delegates in Texas, one week after the voting, and changes in the delegates in California, one MONTH later!"
So I think to myself, "Self, are you about to be mentioned on Countdown?" Because, as has been well-documented, it was changes originated on this website that led to the national media meekly changing their delegate totals to reflect reality.
So Chuck Todd comes on the show, and Olbermann asks him about California, and Todd hems and haws about there being "a lot of absentee and provisional ballots counted late" in the state, which is true, and about how some 3-1 delegate splits in various districts changed to 2-2, which is also true. Then he said, "and so when all the votes came in, it turns out Obama netted four delegates out of these districts in the last week." (rough transcript)
Yeah, that's actually kind of a lie. There has been no movement in the delegate count since CA-53 flipped to Obama on February 15. Most of the delegate changes happened very early. MSNBC just turned away from the counting, neglected to pay attention, and now makes the demonstrably false statement that Obama netted delegates "in the last week."
What actually happened was that my post about the real delegate counts got picked up by the Wall Street Journal and shamed the entire national media into getting it right. But I guess that wouldn't sound too good on Countdown.
The Wall Street Journal has a writeup on my findings of the discrepancy between the national media's California delegate counts and, you know, the actual count.
A California politics blogger has argued that Sen. Clinton won 36 more pledged delegates in the state than Sen. Obama, rather than the 44-delegate margin that has long been included in the news organizations' tallies. A spokesman for the state party confirms the blogger's numbers.
The shift, if validated once the state certifies its election results this week and the party chooses its delegates, is a reminder that the commonly reported delegate totals are mere estimates, subject to change as states finalize election results. It also highlights how a blogger with intense focus on the numbers may be faster than the established delegate counters.
David Dayden, who blogs at the site Calitics and serves on its editorial board, wrote last week that Sen. Clinton won 203 of the state's 370 pledged delegates - and not the commonly reported total of 207. He relied on updated vote totals from the state, based on late counts of absentee and provisional ballots. Later, when he noticed that several major news organizations still were showing Sen. Clinton with 207 delegates, he wrote a follow-up post explaining his calculation and exhorting, "I know math is hard and everything, but get out your calculators, people."
I've long since given up on trying to correct the misspelling of my name, the most misspelled five-letter word in the English language. But the author did a good job describing the situation. The "delegate counters" at the media outlets have pretty much ignored these states once Election Day ends. As Bob Mulholland rightly points out in the piece, this count has been this way for at least two weeks. There was ample time to catch up. But it took public pressure to get them to do it:
The New York Times's page for California results shows the 207-163 result, but a page listing delegate totals for each state showed the 203-167 margin. NBC and CBS still showed the 207-163 margin. An inquiry to New York Times polling editor Janet Elder wasn't returned. An NBC spokesman told me, "Apparently, there are discrepancies between the state count and the individual county tallies." Kathy Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, told me, "delegate allocation is a work in progress." (UPDATE: Ms. Frankovic told me later Monday that CBS would update its totals to reflect the 203-167 margin. "Thanks for alerting us to the problem," she said.)
NBC is spinning madly. They just stopped paying attention.
The official canvass will be done on March 15, and we'll know at that point what the final number is. Until then, I wouldn't trust anything on those "delegate scoreboards".
The best thing in the world about CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen is that the best way to reach her is through her Facebook page. So she got back to me pretty quickly when I asked about this delegate situation. I was wrong about a couple things. The vote has not been certified, although I was led to believe that the counting had to stop within 30 days of the voting, which would have been March 4. In fact, that may be true; but the county registrars have a few days left to report their results. Also, it's up to the state Democratic Party to award the delegates, but that's based on the certified vote count in the respective districts. The upshot is that the counties have to report by March 11, and Secretary of State Bowen will certify the vote by March 15. Then the CDP will award delegates based on that.
So the numbers are still subject to change slightly. But none of this should obscure the fact that, based on the current numbers, the delegate count is 203-167. And the zombie lie that it's different has spread to the pages of the Washington Post:
To be sure, Team Obama's small-state strategy may have been the candidate's only option against a far-better-known opponent, and it has worked. In the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday contests that Obama's campaign staff had hoped to merely survive, Obama and Clinton just about broke even. He won more delegates in Kansas and Idaho than she won in New Jersey. Her big win in California -- with its net gain of 41 delegates -- was negated by his wins in Georgia and Nebraska.
Except the net gain is currently 36 delegates, but what the hell do I know, I'm not some big-city editor.
Yesterday I wrote a diary proving that the national media had their delegate counts completely wrong for weeks. I sent an email to the AP referencing this and asking them to change their counts.
Being that I kind of don't pay attention to the national media's delegate counts, I hadn't realized that they were all getting California so very, very wrong, and in fact are about 800,000 votes off from the official tally. Apparently many news organizations predict that Clinton will reap 207 delegates from California, and Obama 163. MSNBC has this. Real Clear Politics has this. CBS has this. The New York Times has this. CNN has it as 204-161 with 5 to be decided. They're all simply wrong, and I know math is hard and everything, but get out your calculators, people.
Here's an example at MSNBC's site. They list 2,144,251 votes for Clinton and 1,746,013 for Obama, which was right... about two weeks ago. The actual official returns, readily available at the Secretary of State's website, are 2,553,784 for Clinton and 2,126,600 for Obama. That's really, really off. The final percentage is 8.7% and MSNBC lists it as 10%. And that translates to a 70-59 split in delegates statewide. They're probably getting that wrong, too, not recognizing that there are two kinds of statewide delegates which are calculated separately. When you add in the district-level delegate allocation (and I could list them all, but trust me on this), you get 203-167. It takes about 10 minutes to come up with this and it's completely irresponsible for the national media to have this wrong for over two weeks, and to relentlessly show a graphic of delegate counts with bad, outdated information. In fact, it calls into question ALL of their other counts.
MSNBC, The New York Times, CBS, CNN and RCP need to get this right, today. They're screwing up and hurting America (again). What a bunch of incompetents.
UPDATE: Just to embarrass the national media further, I'm going to show my work on the flip.
Here and across my series of 872 blogs, I've been pretty vocal about the superdelegate situation, about how it's a media creation designed to set Democrats against themselves and damage the party's credibility as we move into the fall. I'm not the only one, either. Today comes a thinly sourced story about how the Clinton campaign is vowing to go after pledged delegates who represent the distribution in the various state primaries and caucuses, a charge that the campaign summarily denied. The truth is that the Democratic Party's somewhat convoluted system practically demands that some pledged delegates will be up for grabs, but this Politico/Drudge effort doesn't pass any kind of smell test. Essentially, my feeling is that the Democratic Party put together a system they never thought they would have to use. For decades now both parties have created a calendar designed to nominate a candidate as early as humanly possible. They never considered the implications of having two equally strong candidates and a campaign that would grind on (although let's get some perspective on that; it's only February 19 here, and the scenarios being games out may be inoperative in a matter of weeks). Now that the system is being trotted out, pretty much for the first time ever (arguably, 1984 brought these rules into play), it's showing a little rust. OK, a lot of rust. They're trying to patch it up and have a bunch of elder statesmen manage this situation. I think this is a freak-out that is far too premature.
This is a quickie. I've been checking in on the final vote totals at the Secretary of State's website every day or so, and today was the first change I've noticed that actually effects delegates. In CA-53 in San Diego, additional votes have given Barack Obama a 443-vote lead in a district he trailed in. This being a 5-delegate district, he would get a 3-2 split there now if counting ended today. He's creeping up in CA-50 as well, within 556 votes.
Also, the statewide vote is down to a 9.2% spread, with Clinton at 51.9% and Obama at 42.7%. That extrapolates to the same delegate split of 71-58, for now, but it's inching closer to 70-59.
So by my numbers, Clinton leads 204-166 now. Ridiculously enough, that one delegate shift in CA-53 is equivalent to the recent calling of the entire state of New Mexico for Clinton.
This, of course, also makes Susan Davis' district no longer "significant" in the eyes of the Clinton campaign.
There are still three weeks of counting left to go until the California Democratic primary is certified, and with delegate counts taking on such a significance, I thought I'd check in at the Secretary of State's returns site to see where we're at.
While thousands of new votes have been counted since the initial Election Day totals, the statewide vote has not moved significantly. With over 4.3 million votes in, Hillary Clinton continues to lead, 52.0%-42.4%. That extrapolates to a 71-58 lead for Clinton in the delegates that are apportioned statewide. However, the Secretary of State's office reports that 845,000 votes have yet to be counted in the Feb. 5 primary statewide - and that doesn't include any outstanding votes from Los Angeles County, the most populous in the state. Frank Russo estimates that maybe 1.5 million votes have yet to be counted, and we can say with some confidence that almost a million of those could be cast in the Democratic race. This has the ability to impact that statewide number, as well as several close Congressional districts where delegates could flip.
The Secretary of State set up a page listing uncounted ballots from last night's election, including provisionals, vote-by-mail, and "damaged" ballots. It's incomplete so far, but some things jumped out:
• San Diego County has 160,000 uncounted ballots. That could absolutely affect CA-50 (where there's a 100-vote split for Clinton right now) and CA-53 (200-vote split) and be a potential swing of two delegates.
• Overall, 356,000 ballots are uncounted, and that doesn't even include LA County or absentees that were postmarked on time but haven't arrived. Frank Russo sez there could be up to TWO MILLION ballots out.
• There's really no way of knowing who these benefit; last-day deciders broke for Clinton in some exit polls, and the 100,000-plus provisionals may never be counted.
Obama actually had an excellent overnight. He kept contact in several districts, won enough in CA-09 for a 4-2 split, and I don't think CA-50 and CA-53 are worth calling yet until we see where the final votes are coming from; he's basically in the same position he was in CA-01. My approximations on delegates show that Clinton will win between 31 and 37 more delegates out of California. At one point last night it looked like 50-60.
(Those are slightly different than Caligirl's numbers, based on late-breaking numbers for Obama.)
My initial analysis wasn't all that off except for one key area: Clinton was able to get 3-1 splits in 8 key districts, almost all of them heavily Latino: CA-18, CA-21, CA-31 (hey, great job, Obama surrogate Xavier Becerra!), CA-32, CA-34, CA-38, CA-39 (awesome, Obama surrogate Linda Sanchez!), and CA-43. If Obama got enough votes in those districts to keep it close, and I mean a scant 35%, he would have basically been even or down by 5-7 delegates.
Those are districts that are dominated by Spanish-language media, that are in Los Angeles and Riverside and San Bernardino and Orange counties. They would be uniquely difficult to organize at the precinct level, and Clinton won based on paid media and name ID and connection to the Clinton policies of the past. Clinton's huge Asian vote probably helped as well, at least in CA-39. I also overestimated the value of endorsers like Becerra and Linda Sanchez and Adam Schiff. Congressmen don't necessarily have a machine to get out votes.
Hillary Clinton was up by a whole lot in this race and she ended up winning by single digits (about 9.5%). Given her early voting lead, depending on how many voted by mail she may have won by as little as 5% on Election Day. But she took the districts where she had a natural advantage strongly.
On the Republican side, John McCain won around 49 districts, Mitt Romney 4. Unbelievable.
UPDATE: Frank Russo notes something very important:
Of the 6.3 million ballots counted for Presidential candidates, 63% or over 4 million were cast in the Democratic primary and only 32% or 2.3 million and counting were cast in the Republican primary. Democrats and decline to state a party voters who participated in the Democratic primary far outperformed normal voting patterns in California. Democrats hold a 10 point margin in voter registration over Republicans in this state and decline to state voters account for 19% of registrations. There is a 31% spread between the Democratic primary vote here and the Republican primary vote.
That's extremely impressive, and a good harbinger for November. Russo also says there are as many as a million absentee votes that have yet to be counted, so these numbers could still move, which means delegates could shift as well.
...In addition, there are tens of thousands of votes caught up in the double bubble trouble, so the margin of victory could plausibly shrink to 8 or even 7.
As for election news in California, the final two polls have been wildly divergent. SurveyUSA shows a 10-point Clinton lead, while Reuters/Zogby has a 13-point Obama lead. The final Field Poll (the gold standard, as everyone knows) went with a one-point lead to Obamatwo-point lead to Clinton, almost exactly in the middle.
Of course, this only tells part of the story, as Marc Ambinder picked up on my caveat that the district-level delegate system will skew the results, particularly in those even-numbered districts, where a high bar is needed to be scaled to get anything beyond an even split of delegates. And if you expect an early answer about them, think again:
So much for having a hard delegate count on Super Tuesday, we're hearing that CA Dems won't have final delegate tally ready until Friday.
Debra Bowen's mantra has been that she'd rather get the count right than get it fast, so everyone's going to have to wait. I think it's a small price to pay for voting with a paper ballot. By the way, DTS voters, fill that bubble!
The Cook Political Report did the same district-level analysis that I did yesterday, and found a considerably larger amount of variance. Cook thinks that Clinton can get over the 63% bar in those heavily-Latino districts (I'm not so sure). I understand that the 6-delegate seats require 58.3% of the vote to get a 4-2 split, which seems to me to be possible in Barbara Lee's CA-09 and Nancy Pelosi's CA-08, so Obama could be in an even stronger position than I thought. And as Councilman Garcetti said last night, they are paying attention to this stuff, on both sides I would imagine.
Finally, we have somewhat neglected the Republican race. The chic pick is that Romney has come all the way back and will take California. John McCain is apparently worried about it, since it would mean that Romney has an argument to stay in the race. Both candidates scurried back here today for extra bits of campaigning.
And yet McCain's people fear he may lose the popular vote in California to Romney -- even if they haul in the same number of CA delegates -- and that the Super Tuesday story will therefore NOT be the crowning of McCain but rather his failure to put away the game, a failure born of his fractious and sometimes unloving relationship with conservatives, especially those millions of conservatives who listen to and abide by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, not to mention Limbaugh and Hannity themselves, and a failure that in turn will be viewed as both a symptom and a cause of the historic crack-up of the conservative coalition that has sustained and nourished the Republican Party for a couple generations.
Which would be fantastic, since it would be desirable for their race to be as screwed up as ours. Could the relentless Rush Limbaugh attacks be having an impact? We'll soon find out.
(Brian touched on the quirks of the primary process here; I ran the numbers.)
We hear a lot about the back and forth of the Democratic primary in California. We hear about various campaign rallies, some of it useful and interesting. Heck, I've written about them myself. What I see less about is the actual nuts and bolts of the California election, and what its quirks will mean for the delegate counts for Obama or Clinton. The AP came close the other day.
