Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker of the House, was among those on Wednesday giving Mrs. Clinton room to make her own calculations about the race, saying “a win is a win,†in reference to the Indiana results.
This is something that has annoyed me throughout this nomination process. A win isn’t a win. There’s no such thing as “winning a state” in the Democratic nomination process, or rather, there’s no real importance to winning a state, since states aren’t winner-take-all. These primary nights are not about winning a state; they’re about adding proportional chunks of delegates to running totals. But to the news media, that’s not quite as exciting.
News anchors were up past midnight waiting to see whether Obama or Clinton had won Indiana, when it really only meant the difference of one or two delegates out of 2,000. The media is used to covering winner-take-all presidential elections, and they’re wedded to the concept of “calling a state” for one candidate or another. Determining a “winner” creates news. But it’s inaccurate to say that “winning a state” matters in anything but a symbolic sense.
Much like the way it annoys me that her camp claims Texas as a win.
This nomination race is a race for delegates, no?
Obama took more delegates from Texas, due to the caucuses, so it seems to me at least that he won Texas.
Any other opinion falls, as does much of her recent rhetoric, under ‘I would be the winner if we totally changed the rules.’