On WashingtonPost.com, Chris Cillizza reports that the Clinton campaign is denying an AP story stating that Hillary will concede tonight.
More importantly, though, notice how Cillizza describes her rationale for continuing:
The Clinton campaign, in fact, released a statement insisting that the Associated Press story that fueled this maelstrom was not correct; "Senator Clinton will not concede the nomination this evening," the statement asserted.
Language is important here. An acknowledgment of Obama securing the delegates he needs to formally become the party's nominee is NOT the same thing as a concession by Clinton.
Over the past few days, Clinton has focused almost exclusively on the popular vote count -- all but ignoring the delegate race in a seeming concession of her inability to overcome Obama in that metric.
Therefore, Clinton may well use the national spotlight tonight to do two things: acknowledge Obama has the delegates he needs while also trumpeting her popular vote edge. Clinton could then spend the next 24 hours (or so) taking the pulse of committed and uncommitted superdelegates about their willingness (or lack thereof) to take her side.
A little-known fact about the 2000 race is that George W. Bush's campaign planned to challenge a Gore victory in the Electoral College if Bush won the popular vote. Ironically, of course, Bush won under that exact scenario.
In the last few weeks, Hillary has followed in Bush's (almost) footsteps by attempting to discard the agreed-upon institutional metric for determining the winner of the race and undermine the rule-based outcome. Beyond the obvious absurdity of changing the rules at the end of the campaign, the problem is that we can't know what would have happened had either campaign been conducted solely on the basis of the popular vote.
PS Setting aside the debate over the different ways you can add up the caucus and primary popular vote totals, what makes Hillary's argument more absurd is that Democrats prefer Obama in national polls.
Update 6/3 3:45 PM: Per comments below questioning my claim about a planned Bush challenge, I've pasted an original article from the New York Daily News below the fold.
Daily News (New York)
November 1, 2000, Wednesday
BUSH SET TO FIGHT AN ELECTORAL COLLEGE LOSS
BYLINE: BY MICHAEL KRAMER
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 6
LENGTH: 645 words
They're not only thinking the unthinkable, they're planning for it.
Quietly, some of George W. Bush's advisers are preparing for the ultimate "what if" scenario: What happens if Bush wins the popular vote for President, but loses the White House because Al Gore's won the majority of electoral votes?
"Then we win," says a Gore aide. "You play by the rules in force at the time. If the nation were really outraged by the possibility, then the system would have been changed long ago. The history is clear."
Yes it is, and it's fascinating. Twice before, Presidents have been elected after losing the popular vote. In 1876, New York Gov. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote (51% to 48%) but lost the presidency to Rutherford Hayes, who won by a single electoral vote. Twelve years later, in 1888, Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by a single percentage point, but lost his reelection bid to Benjamin Harrison by 65 electoral votes.
The same thing almost happened in 1976 when Jimmy Carter topped Gerald Ford by about 1.7 million votes. Back then, a switch of about 5,500 votes in Ohio and 6,500 votes in Mississippi would have given those states to Ford, enough for an Electoral College victory. But because it didn't happen, the upset over its having almost happened faded rapidly.
Why do we even have the Electoral College? Simply put, the Founding Fathers didn't imagine the emergence of national candidates when they wrote the Constitution, and, in any event, they didn't trust the people to elect the President directly.
A lot has changed since then, including the anachronistic view that the majority should be feared. But the Electoral College remains.
So what if Gore wins such crucial battleground states as Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania and thus captures the magic 270 electoral votes while Bush wins the overall nationwide popular vote?
"The one thing we don't do is roll over," says a Bush aide. "We fight."
How? The core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the Bushies themselves, of course.
In league with the campaign - which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College's essential unfairness - a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged. "We'd have ads, too," says a Bush aide, "and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted."
Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team Bush will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can. "You think 'Democrats for Democracy' would be a catchy term for them?" asks a Bush adviser.
The universe of people who would be targeted by this insurrection is small - the 538 currently anonymous folks called electors, people chosen by the campaigns and their state party organizations as a reward for their service over the years.
If you bother to read the small print when you're in the booth, you'll notice that when you vote for President you're really selecting presidential electors who favor one candidate or the other.
Generally, these electors are not legally bound to support the person they're supposedly pledged to when they gather in the various state capitals to cast their ballots on Dec. 18. The rules vary from state to state, but enough of the electors could theoretically switch to Bush if they wanted to - if there was sufficient pressure on them to ratify the popular verdict.
And what would happen if the "what if" scenario came out the other way? "Then we'd be doing the same thing Bush is apparently getting ready for," says a Gore campaign official. "They're just further along in their contingency thinking than we are. But we wouldn't lie down without a fight, either."
Brendan, you state as a matter of fact that the Bush campaign planned in 2000 to challenge a Gore electoral college victory if Bush won the popular vote. I'm curious about your evidence for that claim, since the two sources you cite don't quite get you there.
The Kinsley column states only, "By contrast, it was reported that some Bush advisers discussed plans before the election to try to challenge the Electoral College result if--as seemed more likely at the time--Bush got more popular votes but Gore led in electors." Let's deconstruct that sentence. First off, Kinsley doesn't claim any original reporting on the issue or even vouch for its accuracy; he says only "it was reported" without further detail. Second, Kinsley doesn't say it was reported that the campaign planned to challenge the Electoral College result, only that "some Bush advisors discussed" the matter. We don't know which Bush advisors, how seriously they discussed it, or most critically, whether those discussions ever ripened into a plan by the campaign to challenge the result.
As for the very argumentative Village Voice piece, the only thing it has to say on the subject is, "Bush's willingness to champion both sides of any argument started with his campaign's pre-election attempts to delegitimize a Gore electoral college win, a position discarded when Gore won the popular vote by over 300,000." Nothing is said about what those "attempts" were or by whom they were reported. And note that "pre-election attempts to delegitimize a Gore electoral college win," even if such a characterization could be supported, falls short of a plan to challenge the electoral college results. You can understand the difference by comparing Gore's unwillingness to challenge the Bush win in the electoral college with numerous post-election attempts on the left to delegitimize Bush's victory, some of which continue to this day. Given the very anti-Bush slant of the Village Voice piece, it seems probable that if the writer knew about a Bush plan to challenge a Gore electoral college win, he would have said so.
Before a fact can be little-known, it has to be a fact. A Bush campaign plan to challege a Gore electoral college victory doesn't appear to be more than a speculation or supposition, not a fact.
Posted by: Rob | June 03, 2008 at 02:27 PM
Let me second Rob's point. Brendan, I would urge you to correct your post unless you have convincing evidence.
Posted by: David | June 03, 2008 at 02:44 PM
I didn't make it up guys - it was widely reported. I just linked to quickly available secondary sources. Anyway, added original source article in update above.
Posted by: Brendan Nyhan | June 03, 2008 at 03:45 PM
I would not exactly see the way Bush became the holder of 270 electoral votes "that exact scenario," but in any case...
I recall a significant late airtime presence in California right before the 2000 election. Given that there was no chance he could win the state, the only way the ad buy made sense was to try to run up the popular vote.
There was quite an expectation at the time that Gore would run the table on the larger swing states (including Florida), and that Nader would do a lot better than his eventual 2.7% nationally.
Under those (not unreasonable) assumptions, a popular-vote win by Bush and a clear electoral-vote win by Gore was a very realistic scenario. So that would leave the question of how the Bush campaign would have responded.
It seems quite realistic to assume that the Bush campaign would have been a lot more aggressive in undermining Gore in such a scenario than Gore was in the actual scenario we got.
It is all the more realistic if my recollection about the ad buy is accurate. Because why else care about a popular vote increase that won't translate into a single electoral vote, unless it is a prelude to a challenge?
Now, maybe someone has a more convincing rationale for the ad buy than mine. Or maybe someone can show that my recollection is simply wrong.
Posted by: MSS | June 03, 2008 at 05:20 PM
What happens if Bush wins the popular vote for President, but loses the White House because Al Gore's won the majority of electoral votes?
Brendan's right. This was a big topic of discussion in the days before the vote.
Oddly, nobody in the media ever asked the reverse question - "What happens if Gore wins the popular vote but Bush wins the electoral majority?"
Polls had them tied within the margin of error, the predicted delegate count was on a knife's edge, but everybody knew that Bush was more popular and were troubled that Gore could win it on a technicality.
Posted by: Jinchi | June 03, 2008 at 06:43 PM
So Brendan, you are relying solely on one newspaper story (in a brief search I could find no corroborating source; every story comes back to Kramer.) which in turn relies solely on mysterious and un-named Bush camp nobodies who, we are supposed to believe, talked to no other reporter about this dramatic accusation.
Of course plenty of people, including freshman senator Hillary Clinton, argued in 2000 that Gore should have won because he won the popular vote.
Brendan, you should retract this baloney. You're starting to sound like Keith Olbermann.
Posted by: | June 03, 2008 at 07:46 PM
Wait, Brendan. Is Hillary actually trying to "change the rules"? This piece says she's attempting to make a case to the superdelegates, and points to the vote to bolster her case. All well within the currently-agreed upon rules, or am I missing something.
Posted by: | June 04, 2008 at 01:22 AM
Brendan, the more I look at your broad-claiming and unequivocal sentence,
"A little-known fact about the 2000 race is that George W. Bush's campaign planned to challenge a Gore victory in the Electoral College if Bush won the popular vote."
and then look at the evidence you present to support your "fact", the less I think of your judgment.
Do the right thing.
Posted by: | June 04, 2008 at 08:50 AM
Brendan - You're right. You didn't make it up -- someone else did. But you are repeating this smear against President Bush, and you should be ashamed of yourself for doing so.
Posted by: Jim MIller | June 04, 2008 at 10:04 AM