Nope! Trump and Clinton Ain’t Neck ‘n’ Neck

Today’s lead story on the front page of the New York Times, Trump Wins Big and Clinton Ends Sanders’s Streak, which jumps inside to an entire page in the print edition, never mentions the actual number of votes the two winners received — only the percentages. So we read that Donald Trump received 60.5% of the vote in New York’s Republican primary and Hillary Clinton received 57.9% of the vote in the Democratic primary. Which might lead you to think, mistakenly, that in a general election they would run neck and neck there. But look at the actual number of votes cast for each winner. She got a million votes. He got half a million. Even Bernie Sanders, who lost to Clinton, got a quarter-million more votes than Trump.

Yes, I know. The delegate count in the primaries is crucially dependent on percentages, which is key to winning the party nominations. So the pundits and the beat reporters are all swept up in that. But the popular vote, which Trump is always bragging about, tells you something more than the mere fact that New York is a blue state with many more registered Democrats than Republicans. It tells you that even if a whole lot of independents were to show up to vote for Trump in a general election there — and even if some of those Bernie Democrats were to switch sides, which seems to me highly doubtful — she is still likely to beat the pants off him. It also tells you that it was a significant oversight not to mention the actual number of votes in the story. One sentence could have remedied that and easily disabused anybody unfamiliar with the technical details of the primaries from thinking that Clinton and Trump were evenly matched in popularity.