Many reports stated that Hillary Clinton and John McCain won their respective primaries. Did they really?
Sure, they got more votes than any of their opponents, but that doesn't make them winners for three reasons.
First, Clinton had 39.44% of the votes cast on the Democrat ballot versus Obama's 36.77%. That's less than three percentage points difference. Many polls declare that they have a four percentage points margin of error. Looking at it another way, about sixty percent of the Democratic voters cast their ballots for somebody else besides Clinton.
On the Republican side, McCain had a wider margin over Romney than Clinton did over Obama, but still over sixty percent of the Republican voters voted for somebody else.
Second, the New Hampshire primary is not a "winner-take-all". Clinton and Obama both will have nine delegates each to the National Convention. That looks like a tie to me. Edwards came in third with four delegates. However, there are five superdelegates; I assume these are chosen by elected Democratic officials. I have not seen who these five are or how they'll vote in the convention.
On the Republican side, McCain did get the majority of delegates: seven to Romney's four and Huckabee's one.
Third, the turnout was 62 percent, that means 38 percent of New Hampshire's voters voted for "nobody" by not showing up. If we take this into account and include both Democrat and Republican votes in our total, then we have
38.02% - Nobody
13.24% - Clinton
12.55% - Obama
10.52% - McCain
8.95% - Romney
"Nobody" got more votes than Clinton, Obama, and McCain combined.
This is democracy?
Sources:
http://www.sos.nh.gov/presprim2008/dpressum.htm
http://www.sos.nh.gov/presprim2008/rpressum.htm
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/state/#val=NH
