The tally, though one-sided at 85-13, was still the largest "no" vote against any secretary of state nominee since 1825.This leaves a clear impression: this is the most opposition received by a nominee for Secretary of State in 180 years. That is, of course, if all things were equal. Paragraph 13 of the article, without much fanfare, provides the context:
Through history, no nominee for secretary of state has been defeated in the Senate. Many have had little or no opposition and were confirmed without recorded votes. Only one, Henry Clay in 1825, received more recorded no votes than Rice, according to the Senate Historian's office. Clay was confirmed by a vote of 27-14 (emphasis added).Dr. Rice received 13 "no" votes (13% of the voting Senators) and Clay received 14 "no" votes (34% of the voting Senators), but the AP saw these two numbers as comparable without any regard to the total number of senators at the time of these votes. To match Clay's percentage of "no" votes, Dr. Rice would need 34 "no" votes in today's Senate. The AP's second-paragraph assertion is equivalent to asserting that John Kerry received more electoral college votes than George Washington (thereby making Kerry more popular than Washington). Presumably, the AP would realize that there were less people and electoral college votes in the country during Washington's time than now.
This means the AP either (a) purposely compared two not-so-comparable "no" votes or (b) purposely sought to make a point and ignored a fairly obvious mathematical distinction between the numbers. Let the readers decide.
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