Trailhead

Ickes Thump

Unable to go through a day without holding a conference call, the Clinton campaign put Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer and Senior Adviser Harold Ickes on the phone to talk about Florida and Michigan today. Right off the bat, Ickes asserted that if Democrats don’t find a way to hold a revote in Michigan, Democratic voters will be disenfranchised because the delegates probably won’t be seated at the convention. As Yoda suggests , disenfranchisement leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Suffering leads to losing the White House.

Ickes claims that without their delegation seated, Michigan Democrats won’t vote for the party’s nominee in November. If that happens, he said it would be hard to put together 270 electoral votes in November. (270 is the majority needed to win the presidency.) The problem: Ickes is wrong–in one set of polls, Clinton hits 270 without Michigan.

SurveyUSA’s monstrous polling project surveyed 30,000 people nationwide and then used state-by-state results in hypothetical matchups to figure out which Democrat would win more electoral votes against John McCain. Obama nabbed more than Clinton against McCain, but Clinton still won the White House. She did it by winning Florida, but losing Michigan.