campaign desk

A Super Mess

The Times’s slowpoke superdelegate survey
April 3, 2008

On Tuesday, The New York Times ran a by-the-book campaign roundup: McCain spoke in his family’s hometown, Clinton channeled Rocky, and Obama picked up the endorsement of Senator Amy Klobuchar.

Tucked in all of that was this paragraph:

Mr. Obama already leads in pledged delegates, and Ms. Klobuchar’s endorsement continues to narrow the gap in superdelegates. Mrs. Clinton, by a New York Times count, now leads Mr. Obama by little more than a dozen.

Whoa! Catch that number at the end? Clinton only leads Obama by a dozen or so superdelegates?

To the sharp-eyed reader that might look like big news—especially when virtually every other outlet is reporting a superdelegate spread of about thirty in Clinton’s favor. But alas, it’s a false alarm.

Why is this Times number so different? Well, after a bit of noodling around on the paper’s Web site, I found a tally where, according to a “Survey of Superdelegates,” Clinton has 221 to Obama’s 208. That’s a spread of thirteen, or a “little more than a dozen.”

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But what exactly is this “Survey of Superdelegates”?

It seems that the Times is citing its attempt at a literal telephone canvas of every superdelegate. That, for obvious reasons, makes it an undercount. (CNN, for example, gives Clinton 243 and Obama 212.)

And the survey’s dates make it antiquated: according to another page on nytimes.com, the paper’s “most recent” superdelegate poll “was last updated March 11-14, [and] had 221 superdelegate votes for Mrs. Clinton and 201.5 for Mr. Obama.” A poll that’s more than two weeks old? In this race? Please.

You’ll note the old survey numbers (221 and 201.5) complicate matters further. Under Times rules, how, pray tell, did Obama manage to gain 11.5 delegates since the end of the survey period? One can only assume that the paper has supplemented its tally as more superdelegates have publicly announced for Obama.

It’s not like the Times isn’t tracking these endorsements, as the next graf suggests:

Ms. Klobuchar brings to 65 the number of superdelegates to endorse Mr. Obama since Feb. 5, compared with 9 for Mrs. Clinton…

So if you’re going to supplement your poll with public announcements, and you’re going to track new endorsements, why not scrap the survey? Why not rely on public announcements? That’s what the bloggers at “2008 Democratic Convention Watch” have done. They’ve listed every superdelegate, and sorted them by whether and whom he or she has endorsed. Every endorsing delegate gets a link to a news source citing his or her choice, or the Obama or Clinton campaign press release announcing it.

Yes, there’s something admirable about calling and checking in with every delegate. But there’s no reason that those calls can only take place in periodic survey windows. By holding to that method, the Times is just ignoring reliable evidence that everyone else can easily see. That’s confusing—and it’s just asking for a mess.

Clint Hendler is the managing editor of Mother Jones, and a former deputy editor of CJR.