Beyond the Primaries

The war in Iraq, the collapse of the housing bubble, the far reaching Abramoff corruption scandal, the U.S. attorney firings, no-bid contracts for Halliburton, Cheney’s superduper top secret Energy Task Force, Halliburton’s KBR overcharging the army for fuel in Iraq, Tom DeLay’s PAC money laundering problem, Government produced imitation news-report videos, the Department of Education payoff of nearly a quarter of a million bucks to Armstrong Williams to promote the ‘No Child Left Behind’ law, the outing of Valerie Plame as political retribution, and the 27 military intelligence personnel’s involvement in abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib seem to have finally overwhelmed support for Republican candidates by both Independents and Republicans alike.

As I mentioned in a post titled Riddle Me This, immediately following the New Hampshire primary: I get suspicious when I hear percentages of different sets of numbers compared.  This primary season there has been a great deal of that.  I’m not really complaining about the convention of using percentages when listenign to NPR coverage on the radio.  As artist Chris Jordan has made clear, large numbers are a rough concept for most people to handle on the fly.

Print and web coverage is different.  Even if people do not really feel happy wrapping their head around large numbers, they certainly can appreciate the relationship between large numbers.  As I noted in that Riddle Me This post, the numbers tell a very different story than the impression left by looking at pure percentages.  The numbers this primary season tell an interesting story that I don’t think is getting enough coverage and its all about Open Primaries.

An open primary is a primary election in which voters, "are not required to publicly choose one party or the other. Rather, they enter the voting booth and choose the party ballot on which they will vote in secret." Hence, one does not need to be a member of a particular political party in order to vote in that party’s primary. In particular, a registered voter of one party can vote in the primary of another party. However, one can vote in only one primary. For example, the Virginia Open Primary Law states that “[a]ll persons qualified to vote…may vote at the primary. No person shall vote for the candidates of more than one party.

Open primaries are the best indication we have currently for how voters who are not corralled into voting for a specific party’s candidates are feeling about the election.  I noticed back in January that most New Hampshire’s huge independent voting block cast their vote for one of the Democratic candidates.  Now that the primary season has moved past Super Tuesday and the Potomac Primaries, I wanted to take another look at the actual number of voters who have cast ballots and in particular, how did the people who had the widest selection of candidates behave inside the voting booth.

I did a bit of research and found that so far eleven states with open primaries have voted.  I did not include one of them – Michigan – in my list becuase the Democratic primary there did not count (so far anyway) so turnout was affected negatively.  

Looking at the open primary states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia,  one thing jumps out at me.   With the exception of Minnesota, every single one of these states went to George W. Bush in the 2000 election.  In 2004, the pattern was repeated with the sole exception being New Hampshire.  Voters in New Hampshire in the 2004 Presidential election New Hampshire voters went for Kerry.

Seeing the results in these open primaries makes it very clear that the Republicans running for president  are in pretty sorry shape this year.  Not a single one of these "red states" turned out more people interested in electing another Republican than a Democrat.  I know a lot can change between now and November, but when out over three out of five voters from conservative strongholds like  Alabama, North Dakota, and Virginia choose to cast their vote for a Democrat over a Republican I have to believe that more people are paying attention to what is happening to our government than many people realize.