Hillary Clinton’s Metric Allows Her to Claim She Won Texas CD 22

I have to wonder about the quality of the rope that Hillary Clinton’s statistics group is smoking these days. On Talking Points Memo, Clinton has a slide show up for congressional superdelegates to view, showing that she wins “in the tough districts”. In that PowerPoint presentation, on Slide 4 to be specific, Clinton’s people clearly indicate that Hillary Clinton carried Nick Lampson’s CD 22 in the March primary.

Now I know that Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff have come up with numerous metrics to prove to superdelegates that she is the one, and not Barack Obama, who is the strongest candidate to face John McCain in the fall. These metrics have been quite creative in their construct, with many of them taking advantage of one aspect, let’s say being able to carry a district in the primary, without due consideration of another key aspect, let’s say being able to win against a completely different opponent, a Republican one, in the same district in November. That winning against Obama is in some way a measurement of how she will win against McCain.

But now I have come to find out that Hillary Clinton claims that she carried Nick Lampson’s Texas CD 22, and I know that this is, to use Barack Obama’s more tactful way of putting it, “an inaccurate statement”.

I don’t know where her people got this information, but it was obviously not the way I got mine. I got mine by looking at the precinct-by-precinct vote totals for Fort Bend, Harris, Brazoria and Galveston Counties where Nick Lampson was on the ballot. It’s laborious but it gets you to the truth so there’s some value in that.

Could they have come to the conclusion the way this Hillary Clinton blogger/supporter came to his? By making the erroneous assumption that Senate District 11’s boundaries were a virtual overlay to CD 22’s, and that Clinton carried SD 11? At the time I saw that I thought at best this was sloppy statistics, and at worst another attempt at statistics of whatever the truth is conveniently supposed to be.

Whatever.

Whatever the case, CD 22 definitely did not go to Hillary Clinton, and Clinton has no claim on winning in Lampson’s tough district. That honor goes to Barack Obama.

OK, OK. At the top is the graphic. Here is the math. County breakdowns go like this:

Fort Bend County: 28,512 Obama (61.1%), 18,209 Clinton (38.9%) – 98 precincts
Harris County: 13,650 Obama (43.8%), 17,501 Clinton (56.2%) – 76 precincts
Brazoria County: 7,170 Obama (59.2%), 4,948 Clinton (40.8%) – 20 precincts
Galveston County: 5,440 Obama (53.1%), 4,814 Clinton (46.9%) – 21 precincts
Totals: 52,072 Obama (53.4%), 45,472 Clinton (46.6%) – 215 precincts

But now this is what I have to ask myself. If this is something that I know with a certainty, and Clinton’s people have it wrong, if they are mistaken in an area that I definitely know about, can they be mistaken in other areas that I don’t know about?

In short, where else is the Clinton campaign ly . . . er . . . making inaccurate statements?