Mickey Kaus notes:
Psst: President Bush got 87% of the vote in the Republican primary. Isn’t that not so good?
Answer: The New Hampshire primary’s just like that. Dozens of candidates pay the filing fee and get their names listed on the ballot, and many of them spend serious time conducting their more-or-less unserious campaigns in the state. Lots of NH voters are just contrarian. And people insist on conductong write-ins of members of the opposite parties– sometimes because they’re true believers (e.g. committed Reagan Democrats), sometimes because they didn’t realize that they wouldn’t get to vote in the fun primary because they were members of the party that didn’t have a real race that year. And so the never-heard-of-ems and the write-ins often combine to get 5-15% of the vote or so. Consider: in 1984, Reagan got just 86.4% of the Republican vote (though he also got 5% of the Democratic vote; the Union Leader’s ‘endorsement’ in the Democratic primary was to write in Reagan). In 1996 Clinton got something under 95% of the Democratic vote.
This time most of the non-Bush votes seem to have been write-ins for Democrats. This just means that registered Republican voters got innundated with ads for the Democrats, didn’t realize that they wouldn’t get to vote in the exciting primary, showed up at the ballot booth, and wrote one in.
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