Clinton Steps Up Call to Count Voided Florida, Michigan Contests.htm

Hillary Clinton strengthened her pitch to recognize the discounted Florida and Michigan primaries Saturday following the collapse of yet another re-do primary proposal.
The pitch potentially lays the groundwork for her to make the case to uncommitted superdelegates that she’s the popular vote favorite should she narrow the gap with Barack Obama in the upcoming contests.
“I will … keep fighting to make sure the votes of the people in Florida and Michigan are counted,” Clinton said in Hillsboro, Ore., Saturday. “2.3 million voters turned out.”
The New York senator won both primaries in January, but neither candidate campaigned there ahead of the vote and Obama was not even on the ballot in Michigan. The Democratic Party stripped the states of their delegations for holding early primaries in violation of party rules.
“Now some say their votes should be ignored and that the popular vote in Michigan and Florida should just be discounted. Well I have a different view,” Clinton said Saturday. “The popular vote in Florida and Michigan has already been counted. It was determined by election results, it was certified by election officials in each state. It’s been officially tallied by the secretary of state in each state.”
Clinton is arguing anew that those elections were bona fide tests of the candidates’ appeal among voters, after Michigan Democrats on Friday formally ditched the latest effort to hold a do-over primary. Florida has done the same, effectively killing chances of holding re-dos of any kind.
The decisions mean that hopes for a resolution to seat the delegates at the August convention mostly rest on the two Democrats’ campaigns striking a compromise on how to allocate the delegations. And while Obama’s campaign has firmly resisted seating the delegations based on the states’ January primaries, Clinton’s campaign has pushed to have the states represented at the August Democratic National Convention in Denver.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean this week even said he’s committed to finding a way to seat both delegations, though it’s unclear how that would happen.
With the candidates 134 total delegates apart, Florida and Michigan could tip the race, especially if Clinton carries significant wins in the 10 remaining Democratic contests. It’s impossible for either candidate to score enough delegates to clinch the nomination on pledged delegates alone in those contests. So aside from Florida’s and Michigan’s 313 pledged delegates, the superdelegates — party officials and insiders not bound