I concur with James Joyner that of all the measuring sticks being used to determine who has the “real” lead in the Democratic primary (since neither Hillary nor Obama will finish with enough delegates to clinch the nomination), one of the oddest is the raw vote totals. A couple of problems with using this metric:

* As many have noted, if you don’t have a few hours to commit on a winter’s night, you can’t participate in a caucus. So lumping in those results with the primary results is comparing apples and oranges. Team Hillary contends they perform better in primary states than caucus states. Whether they’re right or not, the raw vote totals would look quite different if people could go any time of day and just mark a ballot.

* Ironically, the states that are voting later in the process are having the most impact on the “binary” choice that has been clear since Edwards dropped out. States that voted earliest “wasted” a portion of their votes on candidates who departed the race. How would those who voted for Edwards, Richardson, Biden, Dodd, etc. cast their ballots if they had known their choice would come down to one of these two?

* The Barack Obama we see today looks very different than the guy who won Iowa back in early January. If Iowans had known about NAFTA-quiddick, the Rezko trial, Samantha Power saying the Iraq plan was tentative, Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, etc.; would they have voted the same way? (For that matter, would New Hampshire and Nevada Democrats have rescued Hillary if they could see how her campaign would get increasingly negative and tougher on Obama in the following weeks?) The voters who are deciding today have a lot more information to base their decision on, not least of which knowing that the Democratic nominee will have to match up well against John McCain.

* Do you count Florida and Michigan? In Michigan, Obama and Edwards weren’t on the ballot. But they were in Florida.

Most of the various versions of the raw vote counts have Obama up. And superdelegates are free to take that into account, or any other factor they deem relevant. But if Barack Obama carries 47.5 percent and Hillary carries 47.2 percent (which is how it currently breaks down with Michigan and Florida included), is it really that much of a win? Can any superdelegate look at that and say, “well, clearly Obama is the more popular choice?”