The Truth About The 1968 Democratic Primary

On Friday Hillary Clinton shocked a lot of people by bringing up Robert Kennedy’s assassination during the 1968 Democratic primary.

She has said her words have been taken out of context and she has apologized to the Kennedy family, but in another example of Clinton’s lack of class she did not apologize to Obama. Clinton said that what she really was trying to get across by her statement is that it’s normal for the Democratic primary process to go into June just as it did in 1968.

But what’s been lost in all of the “assassination” talk is just how far off base her comparison to 1968′s primary schedule actually is. The Democratic primary was completely different in 1968. In fact only 13 states even participated! That’s right; the voters in 37 states did not even participate in the selection of the Democratic nominee in 1968. Does it really make sense to compare the timing of things in ’68 to today? No. Not at all.

At the time of Kennedy’s assassination in June of ’68, he had just won the Democratic primary in California. Yes, if California was going to hold their primary in June then it would be understandable why Clinton is hanging around. But that’s not the case. California voted nearly 4 months ago. This is not 1968. The comparison is ludicrous.

The party moved this years primaries up with the intention of settling on a nominee earlier. That’s why there are only two states (and Puerto Rico) left to vote! To add to that, they are two of the smallest (in population) states in the country. Montana & South Dakota’s results are going to do nothing to change the fact that Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee!

At the time of Kennedy’s assassination he was second in delegates won with 393. Hubert Humphrey was in first place with 561 delegates. Eugene McCarthy was in 3rd place with 258 delegates. Humphrey of course ended up being the nominee and it’s likely he would have been the nominee even if Kennedy had not been shot.

The reason I bring this up is that Eugene McCarthey had a large advantage in the popular vote in ’68. He won 2.9 million votes while Kennedy had 2.3 million. Hubert Humphrey was in 8th place in total popular vote with only 166,463 votes! In fact he won only 2% of the overall vote compared to Eugene McCarthy’s 39%! This important to note because the “popular vote” has NEVER BEEN AN IMPORTANT METRIC IN THE NOMINATION PROCESS! Nominees have always been chosen by delegates.

Pretending like some distorted counting of a popular vote metric is important is completely bogus and laughable to anyone who truly understands how the nomination process works. You simply cannot change the rules of a nominating process once it has begun. You can’t just add up all the votes from states who have completely different voting systems (caucuses, closed primaries, semi open primaries, open primaries) and think you are getting some meaningful result. The Hillary Clinton campaign knows this, yet they persist in bringing up this bogus “popular vote” metric in attempt to muddy the waters.

On top of how stupid the popular vote argument is, they don’t even “win” the popular vote unless you count states that everyone agreed would not count and where the candidates did not campaign. One of which Obama was not even on the ballot (and yes they give Obama zero votes in Michigan while Clinton gets over 300,000 in their insane version of “Democracy.” Do they really expect anyone to believe that democracy is when only one candidate is on the ballot?) It’s a disgustingly dishonest attempt at fooling the American people.

Another interesting fact about the 1968 primaries is that on the Republican side the “popular vote winner” was Ronald Reagan (because of his large margin of victory in his home state of California.) Nobody cared. The nomination process was never about a popular vote winner and everyone knew that. It was about delegates.

You can NEVER change the rules of a contest once it has begun. That is CHEATING. Always. There are no exceptions to this rule. What Hillary Clinton’s campaign is attempting to do is dishonest & it is cheating. The amount of leeway the press has given her in this situation is frightening. Real journalists would be speaking up about the breathtaking dishonesty of the Clinton campaign.

A discussion about changing the system moving forward so that we do not have these sorts of complications in the future is a good discussion to have but this is not the time for it. Such a debate should begin in 2009 at the earliest.