The anecdotes are plentiful, and for those of us who want to see the nation improve, kind of scary. Hillary Clinton supporters, Democrats all, insist that they really are going to give up on the issues important to Clinton and the party in order to vote for conservative Republican John McCain. For news junkies, these voters seem to be everywhere — turning up on TV, starting websites, leaving angry missives in blog comment sections, and emailing reporters (online and off) with promises about their intentions.
Some of this, of course, is the media accentuating conflict. A Clinton supporter who stays with the party and throws his or her support to Barack Obama isn’t newsworthy, it’s expected. A Clinton supporter who betrays the party, ignores Clinton’s endorsement, blows off the issues important to Clinton, and throws his or her support to McCain is newsworthy, by virtue of its counter-intuitive nature.
Do these voters exist? Absolutely. Are they vocal? Clearly. Are they large in number, enough to affect the outcome of an election? Well, perhaps not.
Let’s start with the math. Clinton says 18 million people voted for her. That’s about 13 percent of the electorate. Obama wins about 80 percent of the Clinton supporters in a recent poll, which means that the coveted Clinton-for-McCain voters represent about 2.6 percent of the electorate. These voters matter only if they live in one of the 20 or so swing states — they’re not going to win Massachusetts for McCain. This means the total number of voters he needs to convince and hold onto is small. But Irma [a Clinton-turned-McCain voter] isn’t one of them; as it turns out, she doesn’t live in a swing state.
And even if Irma represents the views of swing-state Hillary supporters and hasn’t changed her mind yet, she may not remain in that camp for long. It’s true that over the last couple of months, polls that asked Clinton supporters whether they would defect to McCain found as many as 30 percent who were willing to do so. But these polls, taken in the heat of a Democratic primary fight, were meaningless. I agree with Kerry’s 2004 pollster Mark Mellman, who likens the polls of Clinton’s supporters at their keenest moment of disappointment to asking women (or men) in the middle of a heated marital argument about their Valentine’s Day plans. In the NBC post-primary poll, tempers were already cooling: Only 19 percent of Clinton supporters said they’d vote for McCain.
As my colleague Emily Bazelon has pointed out, if you’re a voter who cares about the issues Hillary Clinton championed, Barack Obama is your candidate. Now that he’s the only Democrat in the race, when he talks about the policy positions women care about, his is the only voice they hear.
The anecdotes notwithstanding, there’s growing evidence that there’s more heat than light surrounding liberal Democrats voting for a conservative Republican.
The LA Times had a good piece on this today.
Marilyn Authenreith, a mother of two in North Carolina, felt strongly about supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary.
But once the former first lady quit the race, Authenreith switched allegiance to Barack Obama, mainly because she thinks that he — unlike Republican John McCain — will push for universal healthcare.
“I can’t understand the thinking of how someone would jump from Hillary to McCain,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Now that the Democratic marathon is over, Clinton supporters like Authenreith are siding heavily with Obama over McCain, polls show. And Obama has taken a wide lead among female voters, belying months of political chatter and polls of primary voters suggesting that disappointment over Clinton’s defeat might block the Illinois senator from enjoying his party’s historic edge among women.
The rancor peaked two weeks ago with televised images of furious Clinton loyalists protesting a Democratic Party meeting in Washington to settle a dispute over Florida and Michigan delegates.
“There are women still struggling with a real sense of grief that Hillary is not the nominee,” said Maren Hesla, who runs campaign programs for EMILY’s List, a group that promotes female candidates who support abortion rights. But that sense “will grow smaller with every day that passes from the nomination battles.” […]
“Women are voting for Obama because they dislike [President] Bush, they dislike McCain, they dislike the war, and they’re upset about the economy, and those facts override any concerns about the Clinton-Obama primaries,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said. […]
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found a wide gap last week: Women favored Obama over McCain, 52% to 33%. The survey also found that voters who cast ballots for Clinton in the Democratic primaries preferred Obama over McCain, 61% to 19%.
Something to keep in mind.