Over at Hit and Run,
Dave Weigel looks at turnout figures from last night's primaries in Ohio and Indiana. He has some information that should be encouraging to anyone looking for a big Democratic year:
The
most dramatic race was in the rural 6th district, which borders on Ohio West Virginia and voted basically 50-50 Bush-Kerry. (...)The GOP House committee
bought ads attacking one of Wilson's lame opponents, who was on the ballot, thinking they could build up his name recognition and get a critical mass of voters to pull his lever instead of writing in Wilson's name. But Wilson pulled through with 43,692 votes out of a total 65,797. The Republicans' preferred candidate won
his primary with a lousy 18,356 votes out of 37,596. Again - this is a district where Bush and Kerry ran even. Where'd the Republicans go?
Indiana looked about the same for both parties. The most surprising race there was probably in the
8th district in Evansville and Terra Haute, a swing seat that voted 62-38 for Bush in 2004. Neither party's candidate had an opponent, and incumbent Republican John Hostettler (one of six GOP votes against the Iraq War in 2003) got 27,366 votes. But Democrat Brad Ellsworth got 43,213 votes.
Wow--those are very encouraging numbers, and support the
data from Gallup yesterday that Democratic voters are much more enthusiastic about voting this year than are Republicans. Maybe our turnout problems are not so bad. The numbers in the OH-06 further emphasize what I was saying earlier today:
competitive, contested primaries work. They force the cream to rise to the top, and improve the Democratic operation in the area with the contested primary. There is no way that Democratic turnout would have been so high in that district unless Charlie Wilson had been forced to get his act together and build a real ground game and grassroots operation.
These are only two states, but maybe our turnout situation actually look pretty good for 2006. I think we may have been sucked into a bit of "the sky is falling" type analysis because of faulty comparisons. Either we were comparing Democratic turnout to previous years (as we did in Illinois and Texas), or we were comparing Democratic turnout to national partisan indexes
instead of the more appropriate local indexes (the C-50 special election). All of that was comparing apples to oranges. The real "apples to apples" comparison should always have been to check only contested Democratic primaries versus contested Republican primaries or uncontested Democratic primaries versus uncontested Republican primaries in the same district, and then compare Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout in those districts relative to expected turnout. Only then can you eliminate all of the variables. In both OH-06 and IN-08, we have just that sort of apples to apples comparison, and it looks very, very good for Democrats.
I am not ready to start planning the transition to power,
like some Dems, but I certainly like the way things are going right now. We are still six months from Election Day, but at least for right now, the national wave and
Indycrat realignment certainly seems to be a possibility.
