From Talkleft.com: "On January 15, 2008, 594,398 Democrats went to their polling places and voted in their state's primary. The official Michigan election results are here.
328,309 Democrats in Michigan voted for Hillary Clinton. She won all but two counties, Washtenaw and Emmet. 238,168 voted uncommitted. 21,715 voted for Dennis Kucinich. 3,845 voted for Chris Dodd. 2,361 voted for Mike Gravel.
Hillary got 55% of the vote. The uncommitted, who either were truly uncommitted or for Obama, Edwards or Biden, all three of whom voluntarily withdrew their names from the ballot, got 40%. Kucinich, Dodd and Gravel won 5% of the vote.
Barack Obama now proposes he get 50% of the state's delegates. That would be vote-stealing. It would be disenfranchising 5% of Hillary's voters. It would be assuming that every uncommitted voter and every voter for Kucinich, Dodd and Gravel now want their vote to go to Obama.
That's called stealing an election.
Obama prevails in this crazy theory at his peril. There will be hundreds of thousands of Democrats across the country who will refuse to vote for him in November, thinking better a Republican than a cheat. [More...]
Just yesterday, Rasmussen moved Michigan from the "likely Democratic" column to "toss-up" for November, following a poll showing McCain with a statistically insignificant lead over both Hillary and Obama. Michigan is an important state for Dems to win in November.
By early September, 2007 when Obama took his name off (pdf)the ballot, trailed Hillary in multiple polls.
For the reasons I set forth here and here,
the DNC should remove the penalty from Michigan and Florida) and award and seat the delegates from the Jan. 15 primary now.
As Hillary told NPR yesterday about Obama's withdrawal of his name from the ballot:
"That was his choice," she says in an interview with Steve Inskeep. "There was no rule or requirement that he take his name off the ballot. His supporters ran a very aggressive campaign to try to get people to vote uncommitted."
That's being generous. Several media commentators have suggested he withdrew his name was for strategic reasons, wanting to keep Hillary from claiming a win in a race he knew he would lose. That could also be why, unlike Hillary, he refuses to support a re-vote, maintaining it wouldn't be fair and would be fraught with peril of fraud. Only if the DNC orders it will he agree to the process.
And this is rich:
"Our position consistently has been that the Michigan and Florida delegations should be seated [at the Democratic National Convention] and that we should come up with a system that is fair to all the parties involved," Obama says.
His reasoning seems to be, if we don't seat the delegates until the convention, we don't have to count their votes now and I'll be ahead by convention time. Once I'm the nominee, by all means, let's seat them.
There's a very simple, fair answer to the Michigan dilemna: The DNC does a big "mea culpa" and removes the penalty. Hillary gets the delegates according to her vote total. The uncommitted and other candidates' delegates remain "uncommitted" and vote how they want when they get to the convention in Denver.
For others angered by Obama's audacity in proposing a 50/50 "give me the votes I didn't win" plan, check out Corrente, RiverDaughter, Angalchel. Read their commenters too. "
