Rush's Operation Chaos has only seved to prolong the struggle between Obama and Hillary. Figures revealed in this morning's Cincinnati Enquirer show that Obama came very close to carrying Ohio among real Democrats.
Thus, all the chatter about Obama's inability to close the deal in the big states, hard working white states, ad nauseam, is patently false.
See below the fold.
As you will recall, Hillary carried Ohio by just over 10%, 10.29, to be exact, per the Secretary of State's website. This was a margin of just under 230,000 votes out of over 2.2 million cast.
Figures compiled and released today indicate that about 8% of the vote were crossovers:
The numbers, obtained from the Ohio secretary of state by the Associated Press, show that statewide, about 8 percent of the Democrats who voted in the presidential primary previously cast Republican ballots.
In the four Southwest Ohio counties - Hamilton, Butler, Warren and Clermont - the percentage was even higher - 10.6 percent.
Leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties in Southwest Ohio agree that many of those crossover voters were Republicans who wanted to keep the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama going, knowing that their own party had already chosen its nominee, John McCain.
"Those people are coming back to the Republican Party this fall," said Scott Owens, executive director of the Butler County Republican Party. "A lot of them did it just to keep Hillary in the race. But they'll be back. We're not losing any sleep over it."
Tim Burke, the Hamilton County Democratic Party chairman, said that while many Republicans crossed over to keep the Obama-Clinton battle going, he thinks that many of those Republicans "were positively attracted to one or the other of the Democratic candidates."
"Some of them were just playing games, but others really left their party and came our way," Burke said.
Records obtained by the Associated Press showed that four out of five voters who switched parties in the election went from Republican to Democrat.
.http://news.cincinnati.com/...
Thus, about 175,000 votes in the primary were crossovers from Repug to Dem. If we figure that half of those were DINOs, Rush disciples hell bent on spreading havoc, that takes 87,500 votes from Hillary--reducing her margin to 160,000 votes--less than 5%. The margin is now about 52-47%. Another close race.
This same analysis can be done I am sure in Pennsylvania, Indiana and other states where crossover is possible.
The moral: Obama's showing in these big white rustbowl states is much more respectable than the chattering classes would like us to think.
The results in November will bear this out.