Primary Turnouts By Party Since 1972

For Republicans disheartened by the disparity between the Democratic primary turnout and the Republican primary turnout, you can relax (a little bit) -- turnout disparity is by and large pretty normal, and Republicans have won the general in years with primary turnout disparity similar to now:



Details.

Thoughts on a super-awful Tuesday

Ouch.

We started the night with four (if you count Ron Paul) iffy choices. We wind up with the worst. With the results that have come in, I can't see how the Republican nomination can go to anyone but McCain.

Let me re-iterate: Ouch.


"Three-legged-stool conservatives" should have voted against McCain for all the reasons Rush laid out. Social conservatives should have voted against McCain for all the reasons Dobson gave. (Is it social issues you care about Senator? Oh.) Fiscal conservatives should have voted against McCain for all the reasons The Club For Growth gave. His only strength is national defense.

Huckabee still thinks he can win. He's delusional. He should realize he's a McCain puppet being used to spoil things from Romney (West Virginia, anyone?).

If I were Romney, I'd stop wasting my money, and I suspect that's what he'll do. He promised things weren't over today, but ... come on.

There is a movement to raise money for the Republican Party on the 7th. No, I don't want to see Hillary or Obama in the whitehouse, but if the Republican party is going to put forward McCain, they don't get my money. I'm a conservative above a Republican. McCain has spit in the eye of conservatives one too many times.

I'm now hoping Hillary will win over Obama because I think she'll be more divisive and more likely to lead to a pick up of Republican congressional seats and four years of deadlock (even eight years of a deadlocked-Hillary would be better than 4 years of McCain and the McCain-Feingold/McCain-Kennedy/McCain-Lieberman -esque "crossing party lines" bad policy he'd push...). I also think, despite her rhetoric, Hillary won't do anything (too) foolish in withdrawing from Iraq. I can only hope. If Democrats royally screw up national defense, maybe we can still squeak out of a few years of safety until a true conservative could be elected in 2012.

Nearing my last thoughts on the GOP side ... on the exit polls ... how in the world do most Republican primary votes NOT describe themselves as "conservatives"? Are we letting independents (non-party members) dictate who our party puts forth for the general election or has conservatism just died a terrible terrible death? I think it's the later, and I'm in mourning...

OK, last thoughts on the GOP race: McCain is on now making his speech. Lieberman is prominently positioned to his right. How fitting. Not only that he has a Democrat prominently on display, but that Lieberman is to his right. Oh - and now he's congratulating Huckabee. Yeah, he had a heck of a win in West Virginia where you gave him your votes to screw Mitt. ... Now congratulating Mitt. His crowd's dramatically quieter applause is telling.

Oh man, he just tried to reach out to conservatives, but in doing so, he called Democrats "our friends" and is talking about the conservative principles he claims to support but has repeatedly spit in the face of...


OK - one final time: Ouch. What an awful day for the GOP.


Now thoughts on Obama.... He's on making his speech now. Some envy: Why can't the GOP have a candidate that's charismatic and believes in his party's platform like the Democrats get?

Also, why doesn't Obama ever have to actually lay out a policy proposal or accomplishment? Cha-cha-change, yes-we-can-yes-we-can, and it's-all-about-you-you-you don't tell me how you'll govern, sir...

Well, now he's attacking Bush and the Republican candidates. Starting to show his true colors? Somehow I think people will continue to be misled that somehow he's a moderate interested in bipartisanship.

Oh wow, some policy suggestions. Tax funding of college educations. Pulling out of Iraq. Big big big government. That's moderate right?

And, back to cha-cha-change. "Ordinary people can still do extraordinary things." Sounds nice. I'd prefer you were honest and just admit you're a liberal.

Nope, back to the prose: "We are the change you seek", "yes-they-can", "we are the hope of the father who goes to work before dawn", "yes-he-can", "we are the hope of the woman who hear her city will not be rebuilt", "yes-she-can", "we are the hope of the future", "we know that we have seen something happen", "we know that what began as a whisper has swelled to a chorus that can not be ignored", "a hymn that will heal this nation", "YES WE CAN YES WE CAN YES WE CAN"...

With all respect, I hope you can't (is my hope audacious?) Government's gotten plenty big under Bush. I'd hate to see it under your leadership, Senator.

GOP Primary Predictions - Results

You can find my "methodology"/approach to coming up with these results in my previous post.

Predicted GOP Primary Results

Iowa (1/14/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	37	33
Thompson	17	13
Giuliani	10
McCain	3
Huckabee	12

South Carolina (1/19/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	8
Thompson	36	45
Giuliani	26	22
McCain	10
Huckabee	10

New Hampshire (1/22/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	39	10
Thompson	20	3
Giuliani	22	4
McCain	4
Huckabee	7

Delegate total after these three: Romney: 43, Thompson: 61; Giuliani: 22.

After failing to gain delegates in IA, SC, or NH, McCain and Huckabee will drop out.

Note: SC most likely will change it's date. If it doesn't, Romney is in a lot of trouble though. He's focused a lot on IA and NH, both of which he will likely win, but a SC "hiccup" in between will destroy any momentum he would get from IA and NH wins.

Florida (1/29/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	18	13
Thompson	41	57
Giuliani	39	52

Heading into Super Tuesday, Romney is now officially in a lot of trouble. The big and non-southern states coming up are also likely going to give Rudy a big bump at Thompson's expense.

Delegate total after four: Romney: 56, Thompson: 118; Giuliani: 74.

Georgia (2/05/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	22	16
Thompson	52	85
Giuliani	20	13

Illinois (2/05/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	12
Thompson	38	28
Giuliani	46	42

Half way through the selected Super Tuesday states...

Delegate total after six: Romney: 72, Thompson: 231; Giuliani: 129.

Now Rudy-territory's turn...

New York (2/05/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	14
Thompson	26	19
Giuliani	53	82

California (2/05/08)

Candidate	% of the vote	# of delegates
Romney	18	16
Thompson	29	36
Giuliani	49	121

Delegate total after six: Romney: 88, Thompson: 286; Giuliani: 332.

From the states I picked, Rudy comes away with roughly a 15% lead. Unfortunately, I think if I had brought in the full array of Super-Tuesday-and-before states, things get more bleak for Thompson. Utah will most certainly go to Romney, but of the remainder, I think they'll break down as follows (# of delegates follows the state name):

Thomspon
Wyoming: 12
Alabama: 39
Alaska: 29
Arkansas: 34
North Dakota: 26
Tennessee: 55
Oklahoma: 42

Giuliani
Nevada: 34
Maine: 21
Arizona: 53
Colorado: 46
Connecticut: 30
Delaware: 18
Minnesota: 41
Missouri: 58
New Jersey: 52
West Virginia: 18

For the sake of simplicity, if you give the full number of delegates to the candidate, we have a grand total between Rudy and Fred of Thompson: 523; Giuliani: 703.

That doesn't look too good, but it may be close enough to keep Fred in the race through March 4th when I think Thompson could probably close the gap by picking up Ohio and Texas. If that happens, we'd be looking at a race through April or May though which could complicate things for Republicans in the general election.

The good news is Thompson is much more likely to get a bump in the weeks ahead than Giuliani, if Thompson pulls off the whole going-official thing well. My predictions also don't really factor in what should be an extra Thompson-bump heading into Super Tuesday with Thompson then in the lead (and Giuliani really almost without any delegates to speak of).

Right now it looks to me like Rudy certainly has the upper hand, but it's certainly not out of reach for Fred. Mitt, I think, is in a fair bit of trouble unless NH and IA can propel him ahead. I think Fred's likely taking of the immediately following (or in-between) Southern states are going to screw that up for Mitt though.

Finally, even in recent end-of-August polls, Huckabee can't break 5% in the early states. I think he's basically failed to capitalize on his brief success in the straw poll. And McCain is in a tailspin in all the graphs and I full expect him to wind up in the 3-10% level Huckabee is in by the time January is here.

GOP Primary Predictions - Intro

My goal for this post was/is to make some predictions about the GOP '08 primaries and figure out just how much work Thompson has to do to get in front of Giuliani (or, put another way, figure out how inevitable is it that Giuliani will be the '08 GOP candidate?).

I started by spending some time looking over the Republican presidential primary poll results over at Pollster.com. I then proceeded to make some predictions for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, and California (six of the eight states for which they have polling graphs).

For each state, I tried to follow the trends I saw in it's graph to arrive at a January '08 number. Obviously the trends these graphs show will likely change over the next four months, but the trends were generally quite clear and had been fairly consistent over the last four or more months, so I think using the trend-result numbers will be closer to reality than the current snapshot numbers.

I also made the assumption that Gingrich supporters would ultimately turn into Thompson supporters. Newt is tacitly supporting Fred, and it seems to me that Gingrich supporters probably support Gingrich because they aren't thrilled with Rudy McRomney. Perhaps I'm being myopic to the possibility Gingrich supporters would wind up with the Huckabee camp, but I think overall this is a pretty safe assumption.

Here's what my predictions, per the above, end up looking like on the polling graph overlaying the six states:


The big colored dots are where I think the candidates will wind up. There should be six dots for each (one for each state mentioned above).

The graph is nice and all, but prediction-wise, it's more valuable to see how things actually break down for each of the states, and sort of go state-by-state like it will actually happen.

Prompted my desire for that approach, I compiled the '08 Republican primary schedule and having done that I actually decided I didn't like my original mix of states. I don't think it would really be worthwhile to look at all fifty states, or even all of the "early" (up through "Super Mega Extrodinary Tuesday!!!") states. So, I'm going to leverage the "Influence" index I added to my '08 GOP primary schedule and I'm looking at the states with an influence number greater than 10 who vote before March. Ohio and Texas have >10 influence numbers, but things really are generally decided before they will actually vote in March. Thus, the states that meet my criteria are Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois, New York, California, and Georgia.

For Iowa, SC, NH, FL, and CA I'm using the numbers I arrived at in my mega-graph above. For New York, I'm also going to take the same approach using New York's graph from Pollster.com. For IL and GA, which don't have graphs at Pollster.com, I'm using opinion polling recorded on Wikipedia.

A final note on my "methodology" is regarding turning voting percentages into numbers of delegates from that state. There are actual rules documenting how that's supposed to work, but each state has some delegates that are sort of flexible (not necessarily tied to the state's popular vote) so it gets extra complicated, fast. I tried to look at historical delegate allocations for percentages and use that. Generally, it appears that the top candidate winds up with say 60-80% of the state's delegates and the remainder get spread among the other top vote getters who got more than 10-15% of the vote.

And now with all this background out of the way ... onto the results.

(Republican) '08 Primary Schedule

I've been working on coming up with some '08 primary predictions and as part of that wanted to figure out exactly when the different states where holding their primaries. I had a heck of a time trying to figure that out.

I started with Vote Smart's list but it was very outdated. Wikipedia's list was pretty good though I wanted have a secondary source. For that secondary source I used Green Paper's notes and then the National Conference of State Legislature's list. In the couple spots where it appeared there may have been discrepancies I tried to resolve them by searching the news, and ultimately I believe Wikipedia's list was just about fully accurate.

Anyway, in case anyone else is looking for this information, I'm publishing it here. And, FYI, is likely to change between now and January '08.

Also, my list has an extra column called "Influence". This is just an index I put together balancing # of delegates with how early the state votes. It's certainly not anything official, but it is helpful for me in determining the states for which I want to bother making predictions. Just for reference, there are 500 "influence points" total.

Finally, one last important note - a bunch of states are in the list twice. That's because they are deciding how to allocate a subset of their delegates on two different dates. (Trying to figure out the process by which the votes actually turn into delegate allocations is also a heck of a matter to try to figure out... [and a matter I leave as an exercise for the reader. :D]).

In any event, here are the current (tentative) dates for Republican '08 Presidential Primaries:

Early States

State	Date	Delegates	Influence	Notes
Wyoming (A)	01/05/08	12	10	I think WY will ultimately go to being no earlier than 1/22. Curiously, the parties seem more upset with FL and SC than Wyoming
Iowa	01/14/08	41	30	I think IA may move earlier if WY does not move later
Nevada	01/19/08	34	10
South Carolina	01/19/08	47	25	Parties want SC to move to a later date
New Hampshire	01/22/08	24	15	NH will likely move earlier if other states don't move later
Florida	01/29/08	114	35	Parties want FL to move to a later date
Maine	02/02/08	21	10

Super Duper Tuesday

State	Date	Delegates	Influence
Alabama	02/05/08	48	5
Alaska	02/05/08	29	5
Arizona	02/05/08	53	10
Arkansas	02/05/08	34	5
California	02/05/08	173	45
Colorado	02/05/08	46	10
Connecticut	02/05/08	30	5
Delaware	02/05/08	18	2.5
Georgia	02/05/08	72	15
Illinois	02/05/08	70	15
Minnesota	02/05/08	41	5
Missouri	02/05/08	58	10
New Jersey	02/05/08	52	10
New York	02/05/08	101	25
North Dakota	02/05/08	26	5
Oklahoma	02/05/08	42	5
Tennessee	02/05/08	55	10
Utah	02/05/08	36	5
West Virginia (A)	02/05/08	18	2.5

The Rest

State	Date	Delegates	Influence	Notes
Louisiana	02/09/08	46	10
Washington (A)	02/09/08	18	5
District of Columbia	02/12/08	19	5
Maryland	02/12/08	37	5
Virginia	02/12/08	63	12.5
Washington (B)	02/19/08	19	5
Wisconsin	02/19/08	40	10
Michigan	02/26/08	61	10
Hawaii	03/02/08	20	5
Massachusetts	03/04/08	43	5
Ohio	03/04/08	88	15
Rhode island	03/04/08	20	2.5
Texas	03/04/08	140	25
Vermont	03/04/08	17	2.5
Mississippi	03/11/08	38	5
Kansas	04/01/08	39	5
Pennsylvania	04/22/08	74	10	I think PA will move their date to 2/12
Indiana	05/06/08	57	5
North Carolina	05/06/08	69	7.5
Wyoming (B)	05/10/08	16	2.5
Nebraska	05/13/08	33	2.5
West Virginia (B)	05/13/08	12	2.5
Kentucky	05/20/08	45	5
Oregon	05/20/08	30	2.5	I think OR will move their date to 2/5
Idaho	05/27/08	32	2.5
Montana	06/03/08	25	2.5
New Mexico	06/03/08	32	2.5
South Dakota	06/03/08	27	2.5

Note: the states Vote Smart (I believe) has incorrect dates for include: Wyoming, South Carolina, Maine, Minnesota, West Virginia, Washington, DC, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Oregon. I don't really fault them for having in correct dates though ... changing your primary date is what all the "cool states" are doing these days, and it's hard to keep up.