The 'Bogus' Democratic Primary Vote

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

Right, as others have said, you have to differentiate between two different kinds of "mischief":

Type 1: Voters whose top choice is McCain, but whose second choice is (say) Clinton.  They truly prefer Clinton to Obama, and since the GOP nomination race is already decided, they'll cast their vote in the Democratic primary to help Clinton get the Dem. nom., because they genuinely think she'd be a better president than Obama (though they'd still prefer McCain to either one of them).  Whether this even counts as "mischief" is debatable.

Type 2: Voters who vote for Clinton specifically because it either draws out the Democratic nomination fight or because they think she'd be easier to beat than Obama.  Either way, the goal is to weaken the Dems' chances in November, not to pick which of Clinton or Obama they think would be the best president.  Votes cast for this reason aren't necessarily being cast as some part of organized effort like Operation Chaos.  Plenty of people would think to do this on their own.

I agree with all of this.

I think the way certain people have been discounting a wad of Clinton's supporters may come back to haunt us.

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

I think the way certain people have been discounting a wad of Clinton's supporters may come back to haunt us.

I'm not discounting Clinton supporters. My objective was to ascertain the extent to which those who voted for both Clinton and Obama yet would not vote their chosen candidate against McCain in November

Dave

I wasn't commenting specifically - what I was saying is that even if we can siphon off a few republicans who are sick and tired of the way things are, we win.

Big deal if Hillary sucked up some voters who have no intention of voting for a Democrat against McCain - but even if a few so, it's a huge victory.

There's a consituency of moderate/conservative democrats who feel they've been forced out of the party - and for the Obama supporters to have lambasted them (or anyone who didn't support their candidate) as bigotted rednecks kind of defeats the purpose.

The Clinton voters (as difficult as this might be to handle) are the constituencies who abandoned Gore and especially Kerry. Women, latinos, white-working class voters. These are valuable votes to win, and Obama is going to have to work INCREDIBLY hard to get them back.

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

Hmm...

Either you're very optimistic... or I'm a horrible pessimist.

These are not voting groups that Obama lost - these are crucial voting blocs that Gore was losing and Kerry lost.

The Republicans have had the amazing capacity to convince people to vote against their interests.

I'm not saying he can't win them - but he needs one mother of a PR campaign to show people he's not what he's being presented as.

What hasn't helped was the dismissive attitude of many during the primaries. These are groups that decide the election. He built a rock-solid primary base... Clinton went GE from the start... which did her in - now Obama has to win them over.