Teabaggers across the nation are rejoicing at the come from behind win of Christine O'Donnell. In the meantime, Political numbers crunchers like Charlie Cook are scrambling to change their predictions in the wake of this political disaster for Republicans. And why is it such a disaster? Does Odonell have any chanch at all to beat Chris Coons in the general election? Follow me below the fold for some numbers that may surprise you...
Christine O'Donnell won her primary over Mike Castle with a little over 30.000 votes last night. But lets put this in perspective, there are over 600,000 registered voters in Delaware. Christine O'Donnell won with 5% of the possible vote. 5%. And Mike Castle lost with about 4% of the total possible votes. In other words, those fired up Republicans, you know the ones who have a massive enthusiasm gap working for them, made up just 9% of the possible electorate last night.
So where does Odonnell go from here? Not far, and not to Washington D.C. if you consider the numbers. First there is this from PPP:
Tom Jensen of PPP tweeted that their poll (due out today) shows that Democrat Chris Coons had a 44-28 lead over O'Donnell.
With Mike Castle voters.
Add to this that it looks like Mike Castle will not endorse O'Donnell and you get a huge number of Republicans who will either cross over for Coons or not vote at all.
Past performance does not always translate well when it comes to mid-term elections, but I thought it would be useful to look at the last mid-term Senatorial race in Delaware:
There were about 241,000 votes cast in the 2006 Senate election. Tom Carper got 171,000, his Republican oponent 70,000. Thats right, Carper won by over 100,000 votes. About 40% of registered voters voted in this race, Carper got 71% of the vote. Assuming similar turnout in this general election, O'Donnell will need at least 120,000 votes to beat Coons. In other words, four times the votes she got last night. So where is she going to get them? Well, undoubtably some moderate Republicans will hold their noses and vote for her anyway. And she will get some small percentage of indepenent, conservative leaning voters. Democrats? Not so much.
Of course Coons should run like he is 10 points behind right up to election day. But I like the way the numbers look right now.