Soccer Dad

Projecting from primaries

via memeorandum

In Feel the Mittmentum in Indiana!, Will Bunch writes:

But seriously, what to say about 5 percent of Indiana Republicans still voting for Romney, a candidate whose following was about as fanatical as supporters of the Los Angeles Clippers or the Florida Marlins. For all the punditry concern about division on the Democratic side -- and it is a legitimate issue -- I think the enthusiasm gap for John McCain is even more palpable.

Consider this: Indiana is a crossover state, and polling suggests that roughly one-in-10 of the 1.2 million voters in the Democratic primary was actually a Republican -- or 120,000 people. If that's correct, then in rough numbers a total of 530,000 Republican Hoosiers voted yesterday -- 320,000 who backed their party's candidate, John McCain, and 210,000 who voted for someone else. How many of those 210,000 will back McCain in six months?

In Maryland in 2002, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend won the Democratic nomination against a little known challenger Robert Fustero: by a margin of 434,948 to 108,659.

The Republican nominee Bob Ehrlich won 92% of the vote in his primary, a total of 229,927 votes, or slightly more than twice as much as his opponent's little heralded rival.

Yet in the general election Ehrich beat Townsend by 879,592 to 813,422 in heavily Democratic Maryland. The analogy isn't perfect, but it does illustrate a point: trying to project general election results from primary results is a fool's errand. It's also why I give little credence to items like this:

And in Indiana, for example, less than half of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election, while one-third said they would vote for Mr. McCain. About one-fifth of Mr. Obama’s supporters in Indiana said they would vote for Mr. McCain in a general election should Mrs. Clinton get the nomination. Many of those Democrats can probably be expected to stay with their party in the end, but the figures suggest the intensity of the passion dividing Clinton and Obama supporters at the moment and the challenge facing the eventual nominee in uniting the party.

The dynamics of primaries and general elections are different. The relative lack of interest in McCain is likely because the Republican race is all but decided. That interest will likely return when there's something at stake in November. Similarly, Democrats who are frustrated now, will probably rethink whether they really wish to send a Republican to the White House in November.

Will Bunch is reading too much into the Indiana results.

john mccain.