Just for fun, I dug through the exit polls from the Dem primaries, specifically looking for how many self-professed Republicans crossed party lines to vote for Democrats.
I'll warn you up front: there isn't too much value, if any, in these numbers. There's no guarantee of accuracy in exit polls, and no guarantees that every registered Republican even fessed up. Still, I wanted to take a look if for no other reason than to try and glean how much of an impact a certain increasingly irrelevant blowhard had on the primaries.
As a Discordian (hail Eris!) I've got a natural bias towards chaos. Chaos is just more entertaining than Order, when you get right down to it. But did the grandiosely-named Operation Chaos actually earn the right to that moniker, or had Limbaugh's knee-jerk sexism reached into a higher sphere and sullied the good name of a Goddess?
Yes, that question was rhetorical.
I stuck with CNN's exit poll data because it was easy to find and all in one place. That gave me 13 states (Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin) worth of data to play with. Hardly a representative sample, but it'll have to do.
If those states have anything in common, it's that most of them went for Obama. Only the Texas, Ohio and Indiana primaries went Clinton's way.
The not-surprising finding:
- Republican crossover votes increased as the primary season dragged on.
Operation Chaos played its part of course, but more to the point Pub voters in general wanted to feel useful once their own nominee was in the bag. The progression, with the exception of North Carolina, was pretty clear:
SC (1/26) 4% of voters declared Republican
AL (2/5) 5% of voters declared Republican
IL (2/5) 6% of voters declared Republican
MO (2/5) 6% of voters declared Republican
LA (2/9) 5% of voters declared Republican
VA (2/12) 7% of voters declared Republican
WI (2/19) 9% of voters declared Republican
OH (3/4) 9% of voters declared Republican
TX (3/4) 9% of voters declared Republican
MS (3/11) 12% of voters declared Republican
IN (5/6) 10% of voters declared Republican
NC (5/6) 5% of voters declared Republican
MT (6/3) 9% of voters declared Republican
Now for the stuff you may not have been able to guess at on your own:
- Republican voters supported the primary winner in just seven of the 13 contests.
South Carolina needs to be set aside here. John Edwards was still on the ballot and took home more Pub voters than either Obama or Clinton. Obama did beat Clinton, however, getting 37% of the Pub votes versus just 20% for Clinton.
Of the remaining states, more Pub voters supported the 'loser' in Alabama, Texas, Mississippi and North Carolina. (CNN lists both candidates as getting 49% of the Pub vote in Ohio, so we'll just call that one a tie.)
- Republican voters favored Clinton in four states.
Clinton carried crossover voters only in Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana and North Carolina. Read whatever you will into the fact that 3/4 of that list consists of southern states.
Indiana, incidentally, is the only state where evidence exists that Operation Chaos actually changed the equation. Clinton won the state by 14,195 votes; approximately 70% of that gap is made up of Republican voters.
The big number though:
- Obama received about 100,000 more votes from Republicans in the 13 states than Clinton did.
Now, it's possible that a majority of Dittoheads were clever enough to say they were independents, or (as was suggested in Pennsylvania) registered as Democrats. But on the surface this looks like an epic fail for Operation Chaos.
Despite Limbaugh's exhortations to his drones, Obama cleaned Clinton's clock when it came to self-professed Republicans. In fact, in the 13 states, about 4% of Obama's entire vote total came from Pubs. And while there may have been 'stealth Dittoheads' buried in those exit poll numbers, you also have to consider the possibility that some Republicans actually genuinely thought that Hillary Clinton might have been the best choice as their next president.
Limbaugh says that Operation Chaos will soldier on past the primary season, but that mostly seems like an excuse to sell crappy t-shirts. Quite frankly, it looks like Republicans who are sick of the Bush administration's betrayal of core conservative values, core American values and just general incompetence far outnumber Republicans who still listen to a jackass that prides himself on carrying as much water as possible for said betrayal and incompetence.
For all the attention that's been paid to the dire straits the Republican Party is in, far less has been paid to the resulting trickle-down pain awaiting their media enablers. As more and more Americans, particularly on the right wing, wake up to the bill of goods they got sold when it came to Bush, they will also begin to realize that cheerleaders like Limbaugh long ago gave up any pretense of being 'conservative' in favor of being 'Bush Republicans'. Limbaugh views politics as a sporting event, and doesn't particularly care what the home team does or says just so long as they keep winning. When the backlash hits and the winning streak ends, stooges like Limbaugh won't escape it.
He's a poor excuse for an agent of chaos, that's for damn sure.