I've mentioned before how turnout in Democratic caucuses and primaries is surpassing, by wide margins, the turnout on the Republican side: in New Hampshire, for instance, there were something like 22% more voters in the Democratic primary, and in Iowa Democratic caucus goers outnumbered their Republican counterparts by 2-to-1. That trend has continued. Iowa and New Hampshire seemed portentous to me because, in the two elections of George W. Bush, they qualify as two of the three actual "swing states," each having gone once for Bush and once for his opponent. (Gore carried Iowa while Kerry prevailed in New Hampshire; New Mexico, like Iowa, fell into Bush's column after being carried by Gore; the other 47, and the District Columbia, all were either for Bush or against him both times.) Now, in Virginia, a state last carried by a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964, about 980,000 people voted in the February 12 Democratic primary, compared to around 488,000 in the Republican primary. Another way to look at it: Hillary Clinton, who finished a distant second to Barack Obama on the Democratic side, outpolled the Republican winner, John McCain, by more than 100,000 ballots. The Virginia results are here.
To try and determine what significance these results may have for the outcome of the general election, I've gone back and looked at the comparative turnouts in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2000, the last time there was not an incumbent seeking reelection. (I hate suggesting Bush was "reelected" in 2004, since I deny he was "elected," in the ordinary sense of that word, in 2000, but as they say in "The Sopranos": "Whaddya gonna do?") In New Hampshire, the Republican turnout was about half again as large as the Democratic turnout. The story in Iowa was essentially the same. So in the primary election season of 2000 Republicans outpolled Democrats, by around 50%, in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Those two states, like the country as a whole, then split almost right down the middle in the general election. It remains to be seen what will happen in 2008, after the number of Democratic voters swelled dramatically in the primary season, so that the Republican advantage in caucus and primary turnout was reversed, but I think it is an under reported encouraging sign for the Dems.
I don't know much, but I bet people in the McCain campaign are compiling lists of states possessing at least 270 electoral votes that he might have a decent shot at winning. How many of those lists include neither Iowa nor New Hampshire? How many don't include Iowa or New Hampshire or Virginia? As they say in the trade, the Republican map is shrinking.
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