Every four damn years...

...I find something to hate about the way the news media handle presidential elections. And usually I find something to hate about the way the candidates and their parties handle them.

This year it's the fact that the media seem to have the nominating conventions confused with the Electoral College. They're nothing alike. In the national election for President, electoral votes are (for the most part) racked up one whole state at a time. So a victory in (say) Florida for the Republican candidate shifts the electoral vote in the Republican's favor by 27 votes, which is 5 percentage points, no matter how tiny the margin was in Florida.

Primaries are different. The pledged delegates from each state are divided between candidates according to the candidates' shares of the state's primary or caucuses. That means that if the top two candidates in (say) the Democratic primary in New Hampshire get very different numbers of votes, they get very different numbers of pledged delegates, but if the race is close and they end up with nearly equal numbers of votes, they get nearly equal (or even exactly equal) numbers of pledged delegates. Sure enough, according to CNN's Election Center 2008, Barack Obama's "huge" eight-percentage-point win in the Iowa caucuses gave him 16 pledged delegates, with 15 going to Hillary Clinton and 14 to John Edwards. (And clearly there's even more to it than I know about, because that is not even the same relative order as the popular vote.) Hillary Clinton's two-percentage-point win in the New Hampshire primary gave her and Obama 9 each and Edwards 4.

That's right. In terms of pledged delegate count, Obama came out of Iowa with literally the smallest possible lead over Clinton, and New Hampshire was a tie. That leaves Obama one pledged delegate ahead of Clinton, and Edwards the only one of those three who's in any kind of trouble. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, with his "two silvers and one gold", actually leads the Republican field, because Iowa winner Mike Huckabee did poorly in New Hampshire and New Hampshire winner John McCain did poorly in Iowa.

Aside: Note how I keep saying "pledged delegate" rather than just "delegate". If you count Democratic superdelegates, who are individual people that get to vote at the convention as if their opinions were as valuable as those of thousands of ordinary citizens, Hillary is evidently ahead, with 183 predicted convention votes to Obama's 78 (as of today). I guess this reflects her status as the "establishment" candidate. So all non-Hillaries have a deficit to make up, but unlike the margins you see while watching returns on election night, this one can not increase proportionally as more and more precincts' votes are counted.

With the nomination process barely out of the starting gate, Obama and Clinton are neck and neck, Edwards is still in it, and Romney leads the pack of Republicans. So say the numbers, so say I. But noooo. In the perverted calculus of political news reporting, every caucus and every primary must have one candidate declared "the winner", with all others "losing" (and obliged to "concede" on national television) and the ranking of nonwinning candidates considered more important than their share of the vote. This is reasonable in the winner-take-all general election, but it is bogus and misleading in the primaries. There is tons more that I hate about politics, including the fact that my favorite candidates almost never win, but this is a case where most of the reporting and commentary is just plain stupid.