This morning David Postman uses his new blog to revisit the issue of Cantwell’s position on the Iraq War, along with the companion issue of how Cantwell’s Iraq War stance is affecting her ability to recruit campaign volunteers. But in this revisiting, I think Postman may have fallen for some fuzzy Democratic math.

Postman first raised the Cantwell volunteers issue in this story, in which he reported:

Sen. Maria Cantwell’s continued support for the occupation of Iraq — and her lack of regret for voting for the invasion in 2002 — is making it hard to recruit volunteers for her re-election campaign, the chairman of the state Democratic Party says.

Not so, replied the Cantwell campaign and Times columnist Joni Balter, who recently slammed Pelz for criticizing Cantwell. Coming to Cantwell’s defense, Balter reported that the Cantwell campaign has 534 volunteers, which she called a “sturdy” number, “neither overwhelming nor underwhelming.”

Today on his blog, Postman, obviously aware of the volunteer numbers pushback, appears to walk back his own earlier report on soft volunteer support for Cantwell, writing:

Someone forwarded me an e-mail Pelz sent to party members late last month boasting about how many volunteers the party already had. “As of this writing, we here in Washington State have the 2nd most number of folks signed up in the entire country,” Pelz wrote. That does seem to undercut his concerns that a mushy position on the war has hurt recruiting for volunteers for the party and campaigns.

But hold on a second. First of all, what Pelz said in Postman’s original story was that Cantwell’s stance on the war was making it hard to recruit volunteers for her campaign, not for “the party and campaigns” in general.

Second of all, because I happen to be working on a story about the volunteer issue for this week’s Stranger, I know what Pelz is talking about when he says Democrats in Washington have “the 2nd most number of folks signed up in the entire country.” He’s talking about something called The Coordinated Campaign, which is run in cooperation with the State Democratic Party and works for Democratic candidates across the entire state. The Coordinated Campaign has signed up 1,000 volunteers this year, but those aren’t Cantwell volunteers. They’re general Democratic volunteers.

What’s going on here, I think, is this: Pelz and the Cantwell campaign are trying to put down the volunteer controversy by conflating the volunteer numbers for the Coordinated Campaign with the volunteer numbers for the Cantwell campaign. But they’re not the same thing, and they’re really not the same thing if you’re using them as a measure of Cantwell’s support in light of her Iraq War stance.

Anti-war Democrats aren’t likely to have any problems signing up with the Coordinated Campaign, which is associated in most people’s minds with the Democratic Party and anti-war loud-mouth Pelz. But they are likely to have some qualms about signing up with the Cantwell campaign, because of her refusal to apologize for her 2002 vote in support of the Iraq invasion.

A look at the actual numbers shows this, especially when you throw in another point of contrast, the volunteer numbers for eastide Democrat Darcy Burner. She’s a political newcomer who is unencumbered by past statements (or votes) on the Iraq War, and she has way more volunteers than Cantwell.

Cantwell campaign volunteers: 534
Burner campaign volunteers: 900
Coordinated Campaign volunteers: more than 1,000

The fact that an incumbent Senator, who represents the entire state, has fewer volunteers than a local candidate in one of the state’s many Congressional districts (a candidate who the Seattle Times keeps reminding us is a “novice”) would seem to support Pelz’s initial claim, not undercut it, right Postman?