Election Night HQ

Ana Marie Cox, the alter ego of the Wonkette, blogs for Swampland on Time.com, where she provides a unique, irreverent perspective on the campaign trail.

AMC has offered us today, an alternative to the prevailing conventional wisdom - i.e., that Senator McCain’s only hope of victory in November is the possibility of running against Hillary Clinton.    But perhaps the greatest insight comes with regard to the hard numbers.  During this cycle, Democrats have cast vastly more votes in primaries and caucuses than Republicans - but does that fact necessarily mean a victory in November?

Here are some highlights from AMC’s post:

Conventional wisdom has it that McCain’s only hope to win in the general election is for Hillary to undemocratically wrest the nomination from Obama, which would depress Democratic turnout in the general and provide McCain with an unpopular opponent. A Obama nomination would have too much emotional momentum, too much excitement, and contrast all-too-favorably against McCain’s angry-old-man candidacy. Just look at the turnout! Democrats are heading to the polls in twice the numbers of Republicans in many states, and that’s due to the historic nature of the contest — an enthusiasm inextricably attached to Obama, and that will undoubtedly carry over into the fall. What’s more, the conservative base hates McCain and would just as soon stay home than vote for “Amnesty John.”

I am familiar with this argument because I have espoused it.

But conventional wisdom has turned out to look pretty stupid this entire cycle, so I paid attention when a Republican adviser called to make a counter argument. Allow me to paraphrase. First of all, he argued, Republicans are not going to stay home. A core group may not like McCain, but the guy has favorability ratings within the GOP in the high 80s; the people that don’t like him, well, they REALLY don’t like Democrats. And they HATE the press; the more the media tells them how divided they are, the more likely they’ll show up just to stick it to the MSM. But that’s not how McCain will win a general anyway. He’ll win a general against Obama because independents will wind up coming back to him. They’ll come back to him because Obama is an orthodox liberal Democrat who has been able to run as someone who is “above politics” because, compared to Clinton’s partisan-vote-grubbing, he looks noble and pure…

David Freddoso has pulled together turnout data going back over 20 years and it turns out that Democrats are, in general, more enthusiastic than Republicans about their primaries — and it hasn’t helped them in general elections…

My adviser pal’s theory has almost nothing to do with policy or debating actual issues — it’s almost entirely a function of narrative and character. One could argue that’s how Obama has gotten this far himself.

In any case, presented for the sake of an alternate take.

I found Ana’s conversation w/ her friend the Republican advisor to be particularly interesting, as a way to push back against that very CW - since I have a McCain-focused site.

However, I’ll be the contrarian and push back against the argument on the turnout issue:

My view would be that primary/caucus participation depends most heavily on whether the campaigns are *competitive* - not which side has more enthusiasm or more attractive candidates. In 1988, to use the example Freddoso uses - I speculate that the reason more Democrats voted than Republicans, was that the first President Bush took the nomination over Bob Dole relatively quickly (he had it effectively won by Super Tuesday). In contrast, it took longer for Dukakis to drive out all of his opponents - and thus more Democrats voted…

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