There may have been some of them, but there was lots more of us

I noted in an update to yesterday's post about Republican participation in the Democratic primary that Dave Weigel was reporting that Rush Limbaugh has taken credit for Hillary Clinton's win on Tuesday, as he apparently exhorted his listeners to hold their noses and cross over. Weigel also noted an email sent to The Corner, citing (but not crediting) Royal Masset's analysis based on the dropoff in the Senate vote. I think I've spent enough time on this ridiculous topic, so I'll just note again that exit polling indicated about nine percent of votes (roughly 257,000) in the Democratic primary were cast by Republicans, and that in the days before this Tuesday we were talking about how many Republicans might be voting for Obama, since they thought it would be their only chance to vote against Hillary Clinton in this race. It would be much easier to sort through all this if people would just keep their stories straight.

I think what amuses me the most about this is that even if you accept the full Masset theory, that some 500,000 Republicans were playing in the Dem primary and that the real true turnout numbers are 2.3 million for the Dems and 1.9 million for the GOP, then this was still an awesome result for the Democrats, one that should make the Republicans worry about the fall. 2.3 million is still a record, still almost what the Secretary of State was predicting based on early voting, and still a lot more than what the GOP got. If that's the best case scenario for the Republicans, it's no wonder they're spinning fairy tales to make themselves feel better.

And that's the thing. Even if you accept the highly questionable premise that Republicans were flooding into the Democratic primary to affect the Presidential outcome, the fact remains that there were still a heck of a lot more Democrats out there. As I've shown before, that translated to complete dominance of the vote total by Democratic candidates over their GOP counterparts up and down the ballot. One such candidate, Peter Rene, who is running for Justice of the Peace in heavily Republican Precinct 5, wrote me to add to that post:

I received 46,396 votes in this stronghold while Republican Russ Ridgway received 33,198! And it gets better: Dem Sam Pearson, running for Constable in the precinct, received 48,401 while Rep. Phil Camus received 26,153. Camus had a challenger, Kirk Bailey, who received 12,545. Even their combined total of 38,698 was not even as much as Dem. Sam Pearson received! Then there is Dexter Handy running for County Commissioner in Precinct 3. He received 33,928 and his opponent received 18,638, for a total of 52,566 citizens casting votes for Democrats against Steve Radack. The Commissioner received only 41,450!

You can't explain that by saying there were miscreants crossing over to elect Hillary/vote against Hillary. Democrats, new and classic, came out in force. That's the lesson to take away from all this.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 07, 2008 to Election 2008