Browse through an archive of columns by Michael Barone.
Not many people in the political world take the time to examine election returns. Winning candidates are busy campaigning in the next primaries, losing candidates can’t bear to see how few votes they got, and just about everyone in the press is trying to pitch the story forward. But it’s worth looking at the returns just a bit–and especially at turnout.
The turnout story out of Iowa and New Hampshire was high turnout. Some 122,000 Democrats went to the caucuses in Iowa January 19–just about the same as the record year, 1988 (the Democratic Party didn’t keep precise track then). In a state with little population growth, that suggests about the same level of interest this year as in 1988, the year Michael Dukakis lost to George H. W. Bush. Turnout was sharply up in fast-growing New Hampshire, from 154,000 in 2000 to 217,000 in 2004. That suggests a strong level of commitment among Democrats in that state.
advertisement
But there is other evidence that is less encouraging for Democrats in a state that George W. Bush carried by a 48 percent-to-47 percent margin in 2000. Polls taken in November showed Bush ahead of Howard Dean with 56 percent and 57 percent of the vote at a time when Dean was well known to New Hampshire voters. A Concord Monitor poll in early January showed Bush with 54 percent to 56 percent against various named Democrats. In such matchups, the percentage for the incumbent president is the important number, and Bush’s showings suggest he is about halfway between the 62 percent his father got in November 1988 and the 48 percent the younger Bush got in 2000. That’s important because New Hampshire is part of large-metro-area America (most of it is in the Boston media market), where Democrats made significant gains in the 1990s: affluent voters who voted against tax increases in 1988 were voting for liberal stands on cultural issues in 1996 and 2000. If New Hampshire is typical of such areas (and there’s an argument it’s not, that it’s unusually taxophobic), that suggests that Bush’s opposition to the tax increases all the Democrats favor is helping him regain some of the affluent voters Clinton and Gore won over in the 1990s. If so, that may mean that Pennsylvania and Michigan, which Bush lost to Gore by 51 percent to 46 percent in both cases, may be in better shape for him this year.
The February 3 results provide other discouraging news for Democrats. Look first at South Carolina and Missouri, which do not have party registration; therefore turnout there is a barometer of party enthusiasm. In South Carolina, 291,000 people voted in the Democratic primary this year. That’s far below the 573,000 who voted in the state’s Republican primary in 2000. And it was a leftish electorate: According to the Mitofsky/Edison exit poll, 72 percent opposed the war in Iraq. That’s not typical of the general electorate in what is one of America’s most hawkish states. John Edwards interpreted his win here as evidence he could carry states in the South. But what it really showed was that he could win among the leftish fringe who showed up to vote. In Missouri, 416,000 voted in this year’s Democratic primary. Four years ago, 475,000 voted in the state’s Republican primary. Some 63 percent of the Democrats who turned out opposed the Iraq war. This is not a good sign for the Democrats in a state Bush carried over Gore by 50 percent to 48 percent.
Three other states with February 3 primaries have party registration. In Arizona, turnout was 28 percent of 2002 registration (the figure for 2004 registration would be a little different, but not a lot); in Oklahoma, 27 percent; in Delaware, which has always had low participation in presidential primaries and in which there was little campaigning or political ads, 15 percent. These are not robust numbers for primaries at a time when the nomination was undetermined. Opposition to the war was 72 percent in Arizona, 55 percent in Oklahoma (where many registered Democrats regularly vote for Republican candidates in general elections) and 71 percent in Delaware. Again, these are not anything like the results you would get for the November electorates in these states.
The success of Howard Dean’s campaign last summer and fall–indeed, up to January 11, when he told a Republican questioner in Oelwein, Iowa, to sit down–moved all the other Democrats, except Joe Lieberman, to take a harsh anti-Bush tone and to attack the Bush administration on Iraq, even if they had voted for the war resolution in October 2002. The February 3 turnout figures suggest that this field has attracted primarily those Democrats who share that view. They raise the question of whether these voters are typical of the broader universe of Democratic identifiers. And they seem to pitch the party well to the left of where the general electorate will be.
