Primary Games: Past and Present (?)

Photo by Striatic

As Jane and emptywheel pointed out earlier, there are seeming indications that Iowa Republicans may be gearing up to game the Iowa Democratic caucuses to ensure an Obama win.

We’ve seen the Republicans game big elections before, of course. There was the general election for Lieberman’s Senate seat in 2006, where GOPers provided the votes needed for him to beat Democratic primary winner Ned Lamont — just as in 1988, when Republicans crossed party lines at the behest of GOP bigwigs like William F. Buckley to vote for Lieberman in order to punish Lowell Weicker once and for all for daring to advocate impeaching Nixon. And there was the granddaddy of them all, 2000, when Gore was robbed of the Oval Office by Sandra Day O’Connor apparently just because she wanted to a) retire and b) make sure a Republican appointed her replacement.

But there is another election that can be compared to what could be going on in Iowa right now: The 2002 Democratic primary in Georgia’s Fourth Congressional District. (Caution: Number-Crunching Ahead! The squeamish may wish to avert their eyes.)

In 2002, Georgia’s Fourth Congressional District — which covers the eastern suburbs of Atlanta — was represented by Cynthia McKinney, who had occupied that seat since 1996.

Though popular in her district, McKinney had for many years been somewhat controversial locally for statements made by her and persons around her, such as her father, that were seen by many to be anti-Semitic. And Republicans loved it when she attacked Al Gore in 2000, just as he was starting to pull out ahead of Bush for good — a move that infuriated many Democrats.

However, the Republicans stopped loving her when she called for an investigation into election fraud done on Bush’s behalf in Florida in 2000, and they definitely were peeved by her calling for an investigation into how Bush could have allowed 9/11 to happen (which the Bush-friendly media immediately spun into "she’s accusing The President of personally blowing up the TWIN TOWERS!!! OMG!!!ONE!!!"). And of course they really didn’t like her activism on Greg Palast’s behalf in the Barrick Gold mining deaths case. She was rapidly turning from the person David Dreier (R-CA) said the Republicans should thank for giving George Bush the White House in 2000, to someone whose continued presence in Congress could have made it harder for Bush and the Republicans to pursue their agenda. Something had to be done about her.

The solution: Beat her in the 2002 Democratic primary. Normally, this would have been impossible, but with McKinney’s increasing unpopularity among local and national Democrats,  suddenly there was a collection of vectors that made the impossible into the likely. A candidate was available: Denise Majette, a judge who historically had voted in Republican primaries but had recently changed her official affiliation to Democratic.

The results were striking.

If you look at the 1998 primary results for the Democratic and Republican candidates for Georgia’s Fourth Congressional seat, you see that the Democratic primary, with McKinney running unopposed, drew 42, 648 voters, while the Republican primary candidate, Sunny J. Warren, drew 21,636 votes running unopposed.

But if you look at 2002 — another midterm election, when turnout in primary elections should be low — one finds that the Democratic primary election had over 117,000 people voting in it: nearly three times the 1998 total. While McKinney got over six thousand more votes in 2002 (49,058) than she did in 1998, Denise Majette got nearly seventy thousand votes (68, 612), crushing McKinney handily.

Now granted, you can help to partly explain the higher turnout by pointing to the increase in Georgia’s pool of registered voters, which went up by 550,000 from the 1998 primary to the 2002 primary (I don’t have county breakdowns, and I wish I did). And you can mention that it was a somewhat unusual midterm in that there was much pre-election publicity, which would attract the attention of the voting-age population.

But both of those things then make the following thing even odder: Almost nobody bothered to vote in the 2002 GOP primary for the seat.

Look at the results: only 5,594 people voted, barely one-fourth of the 1998 turnout. That’s a drop of 16,042 votes, a drop of 74.2% from the last midterm. Where did those missing voters go?

One rather strong possibility: The missing GOP primary voters all voted for Majette in the Democratic primary — "crossover voting" — which Georgia allows you to do without switching your party affiliation.

153, 247 people would vote in the 2002 general election for the Fourth CD, which Majette won easily. By contrast, 164, 768 people voted in the 1998 general election. So very odd that while interest grew in the primaries, and the overall voter base probably grew in DeKalb and Gwinnett counties, it waned for the general, even as the number of registered voters statewide grew by nearly 70,000 between the 2002 primary and the general election. Then again, many of McKinney’s supporters probably boycotted the general in disgust in 2002.

Now that we’ve established that a non-trivial amount of crossover voting very likely happened in the 2002 GA-04 Democratic primary, the other questions to ask are: Just how many Republicans voted for Majette, and would they have sufficed to provide the margin of victory?

If 2002 was an ordinary midterm primary race, the answers would be "probably around 16,000" — the difference between the 1998 and 2002 GOP primary vote turnouts for GA-04 — and "no", as McKinney lost to Majette by nearly twenty thousand votes, or about four thousand more than the difference between the ‘98 and ‘02 GOP primary turnouts. Then again, 2002 was not an ordinary midterm primary race. It had drawn national attention, and most of it was unfavorable to McKinney; while it may have helped to mobilize her largely-black base, it was much more energizing to white voters, who in this 50%-black district would make up over 80% of Majette’s vote in 2002. But honestly, the Republicans weren’t the only ones fighting against McKinney; as has already been mentioned, many Democrats weren’t too happy with her either.

The overall impression is that while the crossover vote probably wasn’t enough in itself to guarantee a win, it certainly helped substantially pad Majette’s margin at the very least.

McKinney, unlike Joe Lieberman in 2006, did not protest her defeat by running a third-party campaign to keep her seat, so she left Congress that year; she regained her seat in 2004 when Majette, who as The Black Commentator noted would have had a harder time keeping GA-04 without Republicans to cross over for her, instead tried and failed to take Zell Miller’s vacated Senate seat. However, McKinney lost GA-04 yet again in 2006, after she was involved in an altercation with DC Capitol Police; a grand jury wound up dropping the charges against her, but few people remember that. Her last act as a Congresswoman was to introduce articles of impeachment against Bush, Cheney and Rice.

Now, after all that not-so-ancient history, let’s come back to 2008.

The thing about gaming of the extent described here is that it needs a large number of bodies in order to work — and it’s hard to keep this sort of thing from being noticed. In fact, in both 1988 and 2006, Bill Buckley didn’t even try to hide either his gaming of the Connecticut vote or his fondness for Joe Lieberman. And the blatantness of the corruption trail and "Brooks Brothers Riot" in 2000 need not be regurgitated here.

That’s the chief point against the idea that the Republicans currently voting for Obama are only doing so to game the system, and will drop him once he gets the nomination this summer. But the sheer size of his support among Republicans — who have been reading fulsome praise of Obama from people like David Brooks for over a year now — can’t help but raise a few questions (if not set off a few alarm bells), at least in my mind.  Not the least of which is: If the Republicans like Brooks really are sincere in their praise, what does that say about Obama as a progressive?

Related posts:

1. 63% of Pennsylvanians Want Specter to Face Democratic Primary Challenger
2. Accountability Now Targets Jim Cooper for Primary Challenge
3. AL Gov: Rep. Artur Davis Attacked for Health Care Vote by Primary Opponent
4. Shadegg (R) To Vote Present On Stupak Amendment
5. What a Difference a Primary Makes: With Romanoff Pressing in CO, Bennet Embraces Health Reform