| The Mark French defeat letter is slowly making the rounds on the Intertubes, and re-reading it made me want to comment on a couple of his points...
For starters, it's pretty narcissistic to begin with when you claim you're the candidate who'd legislate according to Biblical principles - that is, you speak for God - so it isn't much of a surprise that French blames everyone but himself for his defeat: voter fraud, crossover votes, liberal conspiracies, etc & company. I guess God was busy on election day.
Whatever.
Still, this isn't the first time I saw crossover mentioned as a cause for Republican primary election results. I'm not sure what the basis for the accusation is - the only factual or statistical evidence supporting it is that the number of voters participating in the Democratic primary shrank in 2010 compared to 2008, and the number participating in the GOP primary rose. For example, in Yellowstone county, 19,218 votes for Democratic House candidates were cast in 2008 (pdf) as opposed to 8,925 in 2010; in contrast, 11,071 Yellowstone county votes were counted in the 2008 GOP House primary compared to 22,510 in 2010.
Of course, it was the Democratic primary that had all the pull in 2008, as the Democratic presidential nomination was still in play when Montanans headed to the polls that day. Which suggests that independents and Republicans crossed over to vote in the '08 Democratic primary - despite French's assertions that no "moral conservative" would so such a thing. And in 2010, voter enthusiasm greatly favored Republicans, which probably explains the reversed numbers in primaries this year. State voter turnout numbers support that theory, too, as conservative counties generally had higher turnout than liberal counties. Missoula - after posting very high turnout numbers in the 2006 and 2008 primary and general elections - posted an anemic and state-low 20.59 percent voter turnout.
And even if crossover accounted for the swinging election numbers, it probably didn't have any effect. It was Hillary Clinton, you remember, who Rush Limbaugh urged Republican voters to vote for in Democratic primaries...yet Obama won easily in Montana in the 2008 primary. And while John Driscoll won the Democratic nomination for House over Jim Hunt - an actual real, live candidate - Bob Kelleher's equally baffling victory for the GOP Senate nomination in a primary election no self-respecting Democratic voter would have participated in suggests there was something else at play other than malicious crossover voting.
The fact is that most people take their votes seriously. If they cross over, it's because they feel strongly about a particular race, and they do their best to fill in their ballots responsibly. The absolute and final proof of voters' good nature is Mark French himself. After all, if liberal voters crossed over to the Republican primary to maliciously wreak havoc in the Republican camp, it's the self-aggrandizing buffoon and extremist candidate they would have voted for as the much weaker opponent in the general election. If mean-spirited liberals had voted en masse in the Republican primary, Mark French would have won his party's nomination for Congress. |
