Opinion: Hillary will be home in November, if only in our dreams

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What if the Democratic primaries had been winner-take-all? That’s a topic that got widely discussed over the winter, but nobody’s paid much attention to it lately.

This is a counterfactual that seems slightly more on-point than most, since the November election will in fact be winner-take-all. As Hillary Clinton used not only every argument in the book, but every argument in every book ever written, we’ve all heard the one about how she was strongest in the states the Dems need to win. And the numbers seem to bear this out, though less decisively than I was expecting. I used this listing of delegates per state, then counted up who’d won what. I included ‘Democrats Abroad,’ ‘Guam’ and other fanciful places that held primaries. Not counting the disupted votes in Florida and Michigan I get:

If we throw in Florida and Michigan we get:

If I have made any errors here (a near-certainty anytime math and I meet), please let me know. (I’m also not terribly confident in the data set, which disagrees with other state-delegate counts I’ve seen, such as this one.)

In any event, if the Democratic primary structure reflected the general election structure, we’d have a different nominee on our hands today. I know Democrats are proud of having proportional primaries, but I’m less sure it’s a good idea. That is, I think Obama’s a stronger candidate to put up against McCain, but I think that a lot less strongly now than I did a few months ago, and I find the strictly electoral argument a hard one to shake off (even if Hillary Clinton herself seems to have shaken it off at last).