Spin Cycle

The Clinton campaign is trying to kick-start a grass-roots campaign to force the DNC to change its rules and count Michigan and Florida.

It's featured on the campaign's home page, with a link to an e-mail form that users can use to send a message to the party: "Send a message to the DNC telling them to count the votes and seat Florida and Michigan's delegates."

The campaign, presumably, hopes millions of supporters will blast out the demand. But here's a question (one of many) we've had about the Clinton position on Michigan and Florida:

They say, again and again, that the people who bothered to come out and vote can't be ignored, and deserve to have their voices heard. But an election only has meaning if it's a fair reflection of the voices of all those entitled to be heard.

So what about the people who didn't vote? Of 4.1 million registered Democrats in Florida, for instance, only 1.7 million voted. The rest of them -- 2.4 million -- were told the election didn't count. Presumably, that influenced a bunch of them to not vote.

Now, if you switch around and count the votes, you put the party in the position of having essentially lied to 2.4 million registered Democrats in Florida, tricked them out of having their voices heard. Why are the people who ignored the party more deserving than the people who took the party at its word?

Theoretically, there are reasons the group that did vote may have been more pro-Hillary than the group that didn't vote. But that doesn't even matter. Any way you cut it, if you count the outcome, you've stolen the votes of an even larger number of Democrats by misleading them.