Reverse Coattails?
Apr 1st, 2008 at 1:52 pm by Susie
Anything to this anywhere else? Anyone have additional info, pro or con, about this? Seems like something we should check out:
Backers of both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton turned out with passionate support for their candidate in last week’s Texas primary. But once they got in the voting booth, they did something different.
Obama supporters were more likely to vote in the presidential race and then skip the other contests than Clinton supporters, who tended to continue voting down the ballot, a Dallas Morning News analysis finds.
More than 80 percent of Democratic voters in the Texas counties where Mrs. Clinton had her largest victory margins went on to vote in the U.S. Senate race, the leading statewide contest on the ballot after the presidential race. By contrast, only 71 percent of voters in Mr. Obama’s strongest counties did.
In Dallas County, where Mr. Obama got nearly two-thirds of the vote, the falloff was nearly 30 percent.
I’ve read this before. It seems logical that first-time, or cross-over, or low-info voters would blow off the down-ticket since they wouldn’t know or care who else is running.
OB campaigning for someone rather than just riding the coattails is a little different and creates totally different results (see IL replacement for Hastert)…Altho OB is supposed to have the smarter bloc…
i’ve gif’d the dallas news’ pdf and posted it.
I know I heard similar trends reported regarding the OH primaries. You might want to check Dennis Kucinich’s site - I know they did some close review of that district’s numbers over the “Dems for a Day” campaign (in the neighborhood of 10,000 in DK’s district - from affluent areas) The DK issue probably skews the numbers, but I imagine they did analyses of other OH districts for comparison.
I got polled on the way out (west central Oh), but no idea who was polling. they mentioned electronic voting verification, but who knows?
ps - off topic, but as a committed lurker, I don’t often contribute…
THANK YOU for being an island of sanity re the primary run and bias.
This strikes me as something that Republicans would do, vote for Obama as an anti-Hillary spoiler candidate to hurt her chances. Of course they wouldn’t care about the other Democratic candidates on the ballot, they just want to sabotage Clinton and set Obama up as the more easily-beatable candidate.