Baselice disputes Masset's crossover theory

I don't know that there's anything much left to discuss of the theory that Republican crossover votes had any meaningful effect in the Democratic primary last week, but for completeness' sake, I'll link to Mike Baselice's analysis (Word doc), which - unsurprisingly - concludes there was nothing unusual about the level of Republican participation. See for yourself, and let's let this discussion topic finally die the peaceful death it deserves. Link via Postcards.

And we can add Harvey Kronberg's take, which generally agrees with everything that's been said so far, though with a bit of funny math:

But by any measure the Democrats had the blowout. The Clinton-Obama contest produced nearly 2.9 million primary voters, which doubled their numbers from 2004 and tripled those of the 2000 turnout.

Um, primary turnout in each of those years was in the 800,000 range, so this year was more than triple that. That's an error that should have been caught.

While the Democrats had more than twice as many voters show up as Republicans, pollsters warn that most of these are November voters who were excited by the presidential election and showed up to vote in March.

We really won't know until the fall whether or not Republicans still enjoy a 9 point advantage over Democrats in Texas. My own suspicion is that the 9 points is eroding.

Mine, too. Link via EoW.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 11, 2008 to Election 2008