Until a few days ago, the Wikipedia page, “Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2008” listed Barack Obama as the winner of the popular vote in the 2008 Democratic primary. However, Obama lost the popular vote in the primary, but won the nomination by garnering more delegates. Images below show snapshots from the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine.
In the world of fake news, why would one of our go-to fact checking resources be intentionally manipulated in such an innocuous way?
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won both the Democratic primary’s popular and delegate vote counts. Whether or not you are of the opinion that the party colluded against Bernie Sanders, the delegate and popular vote counts supported her legitimacy as the nominee.
More importantly, skip forward to 2017 and both Sanders and Clinton are targeting the “unfairness” of the Electoral College as the reason Donald Trump got elected — where Hillary Clinton received 3 million more votes nationwide.
The problem presented in this narrative is that Democrats are almost universally in agreement that they like Barack Obama — who received LESS votes than Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Primary.
So how did he win? Simple. He won the Democratic Party’s version of the Electoral College — the delegate count!
Hard to peddle a narrative that we need to embrace the popular vote when your private political party has chosen not to follow the popular vote, right?
So, for a period of three weeks, someone tried to cover this narrative by creating alternative facts on Wikipedia. Fortunately, reality’s watchdog has since reverted the information back to correct the record.
Regardless, next time a member of the Democratic Party says to get rid of the Electoral College — ask them when the Democratic Party is getting rid of their delegate process.
Photo Credit: IB Photography / shutterstock.com