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Original Content at https://www.opednews.com/articles/Hillary-and-Her-Surrogates-by-Rob-Kall-Hillary-Clinton_Popular-Vote_Surrogates-160511-219.html (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). |
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May 11, 2016
Debunking Hillary's Specious Winning the Popular Vote Claim
By Rob Kall
The claim that Hillary is winning the popular vote is one of the most deceptive, specious claims the Hillary Clinton campaign and her surrogates are making. The mainstream media is echoing and giving a total pass on this egregiously dishonest claim.
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Update:This article is getting great readership and views, but it is essential to share it on Facebook groups and to tweet it to your followers, Bernie hashtags and to the MSM "journalists" who are giving the lie a pass. Also, please check out Jean Hay Bright's article, Numbers Prove Sanders Has Earned a Path to White House , which makes a strong companion to this article.
The claim that Hillary is winning the popular vote is one of the most deceptive, specious claims the Hillary Clinton campaign and her surrogates are making. The mainstream media is echoing and giving a total pass on this egregiously dishonest claim.
This is very important for several reasons.
1- Superdelegates are arguing that they are, by supporting Hillary, representing the majority of voters. The truth is that this not true.
2- The mainstream media repeat the "Hillary is winning the popular vote" mantra, or allow Hillary and her surrogates to make the specious claim many many times every day.
Actually, the claim is an affront to the truth, based on the numbers.
The truth is that caucus states don't have a popular vote. That doesn't make their vote less important. It just changes how the people of that state choose to make the decision on who to select in the primary.
Most people making claims about Hillary's popular vote advantage talk about her having around a three million vote lead. I went to the 2016 Democratic Popular Vote page on RealClearPolitics. The page, not including West Virginia, shows Hillary with a 3,135,834 lead.
Then I took a list of the caucus states that Bernie has won, and he's won almost all of them.
I dug up 2015 census data on the populations of those states and then pulled from Real Clear Politics, the total votes and the winning spread for Sanders in the caucus states. The numbers are below. First observation-- for states totaling roughly 35 million people, some which Bernie won by 70%, he is given a total spread advantage of 160,000 votes. That's outrageous.
Caucus states:
2015 populations according to wikipedia
Take a close look at Washington state, which Bernie won with 72.7% of the votes. RealClearPolitics gives him zero votes, with its 7.2 million population.
The same goes for Maine, where Bernie had a 29% spread and Alaska where he won over 81% of the vote. Zero. Zilch. Nada. In Wyoming, Bernie is given 32 votes, not 32,000. He is given 32 votes.
It's ridiculous. But it's not ridiculous that Clinton claims she has a three million popular vote lead. It's an intentional, obscenely misleading, dishonest claim.
When a super delegate claims he or she is representing the will of the majority, basing it on the three million lead popular vote, it's based on a lie. Challenge that superdelegate.
When a journalist on a news network allows Hillary Clinton, her campaign manager or any of her many surrogates, employed by the networks or independent, to matter-of-factly state that Hillary has a popular vote lead, without challenging that claim, they are engaging in unethical, journalistic malpractice, or, framed another way, they are promoting the Hillary Clinton campaign.
If you observe the MSM engaging in this practice, call them on it. Tweet or share on Facebook the name of the "journalist" who gave the "pass." Include the network's twitter address and the journalist's twitter @address. Make a stink about this.
This is a lie that should not be accepted, tolerated or allowed to persist.
This is a follow-up to my article, published April 1, 2016, Hillary's Disingenuous Claim That She's Won 2.5 Million More Votes is Bogus. Here's why
Update May 20:
The problem is caucus states are not represented fairly in popular vote counting. The solution is to stop allowing caucus votes to determine delegates. It's become clear that while caucus states delegates are counted, the system fails to allow the states to be represented in popular vote comparisons. This failure to properly represent them in a statistic that is used in such a powerful, influential way is a huge disservice to voters in caucus states. If Colorado, Minnesota, WA and the others had held primaries the numbers would have been vastly different and an apples for apples comparison would have been possible. But as is, it is ridiculous to count caucus votes and compare them to primary votes. It's a flawed, misleading representation of the election process.
Authors Bio:
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.
Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel
Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel
Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.
Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.
To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.
For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.
Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table
Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..
To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.
Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.
His quotes are here
Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.
Join the conversation:
On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution
and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation