On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
> What cojones. The popular vote is almost evenly divided, HRC is now 4
> points ahead in the Gallup poll, and she's won more of the big states
> than BHO. Why in god's name should she withdraw? Because she's old and
> charmless?
Because she's behind in the delegate count and probably can't overcome it. Essentially people like this are asking Hillary to do what the superdelegates are designed to do -- to transform a narrow majority into a larger one so that the winner will be a stronger candidate.
Tiny majorities bring out one of the central technical problems of democracy: they basically suck to govern with or run on. But any trick to accept their result, and then transform them into something stronger and more effective, will always be just that, a trick.
Tiny majorities also bring out all the glaring flaws in the system that delivered them. All electoral systems have a certain amount of non-representative rigging and gerrymandering. When the margin of victory is smaller than the pool of fishy votes, the losing side always has a perfectly justified case that they lost unjustly because the system is unfair -- and in the case of a primary system, that it's crowning the wrong (i.e., weaker) candidate.
Michael