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Rush Limbaugh and some myopic Democrats would have us
believe that most if not all Republicans who have been voting in Democratic
primaries are “dittoheads” implementing the radio host’s
“Operation Chaos.” Limbaugh has promoted his scheme for months,
encouraging Republican listeners to reregister and vote in Democratic
contests for the presumably weaker candidate, Hillary Clinton.
As the Democratic campaign dragged on, the radio
ranter’s initiative became an obsession among Obama backers, who
didn’t care to acknowledge Clinton’s lingering appeal among
their fellow partisans. U.S. Sen. John Kerry, who is still bitter over hits
he took from the right during his 2004 presidential run, has championed the
chaos concept, especially since Obama came within a whisker of upsetting
Clinton in Indiana’s May 6 primary. “If it hadn’t been
for Republicans’ taking Democratic ballots, he likely would have won
in Indiana,” Kerry declared, echoing conventional wisdom.
Kerry is wrong. The “Limbaugh effect” did
not tip Indiana to Clinton. Republicans accounted for 10 percent of the
state’s Democratic primary voters. Roughly 130,000 of them took
Democratic ballots, and exit polls say they split 54 to 46 percent for
Clinton. That puts her crossover advantage around 10,000 votes, less than
her winning margin. Even if we assume that all Indiana GOP crossovers voted
for Clinton with chaotic intent — a dubious assertion, considering
her demonstrated cross-party appeal among older women — they did not
contribute enough extra votes to account for her narrow victory. Far more significant than Limbaugh’s gambit is
the fact that Obama attracted tens of thousands of sincere Republican
voters in Indiana, continuing a trend that has been evident from the start
of the Democratic race.
Since January — when Republicans who caucused in
Iowa as Democrats told pollsters that they favored Obama 4-to-1over Clinton
— the Illinois senator has been the steadiest beneficiary of GOP
crossover votes. That was particularly true in the primaries of states
where the presidency is likely to be won or lost this fall. In Missouri,
where Obama narrowly beat Clinton on Feb. 5, his strength among Republicans
who selected Democratic ballots — they favored him 75-21 — can
reasonably be said to have given him the win. In Virginia a week later,
Republicans favored Obama 72-23. And in Wisconsin his crossover advantage
was 72-28. Even in Ohio, where Limbaugh pressed his “chaos”
campaign aggressively, exit pollsters found that as many Republicans backed
Obama as Clinton. Are these “Obamicans” conservatives who
see the Illinois senator as a fellow traveler? There is little evidence of
that. Prominent Republicans who have endorsed Obama sound themes I’ve
heard from crossover voters in numerous states. Former U.S. Sen. Lincoln
Chafee says Obama is “the best candidate . . . to restore our
confidence to be moral and just, and to bring people together to solve the
complex issues such as the economy, the environment and global
stability.”
Recalling her grandfather’s concerns about a
military-industrial complex, Susan Eisenhower says Obama is best prepared
to address the fact that “we are disliked overseas and feel insecure
at home . . . [that] our federal budget hemorrhages red ink and our civil
liberties are eroded.”
Obama has consistently been portrayed in most media as
more liberal than Clinton, but he has won crossover votes not by
triangulating or presenting himself as some kind of DLC “New
Democrat.” Rather, he has preached diplomacy, social tolerance, and
racial reconciliation — themes familiar to old-school moderates and
the Rockefeller Republicans so derided by current GOP leaders. That’s
something the Obama camp should take to heart as it plots fall campaign
strategy.
Republican crossover voting has been a constant in the
Democratic race. Although Limbaugh’s intervention may have boosted
Clinton’s GOP numbers at the end, hundreds of thousands of
Republicans have been casting enthusiastic ballots for Obama. They have
done so in particularly high numbers in some of what will be the
fall’s most competitive swing states: Missouri, Wisconsin, and
Virginia.
If they do so again in November, crossover Republicans
could be essential members of a winning Democratic coalition.
John Nichols is
Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine and associate editor of The Capital Times of Madison,
Wis.
This article appears in May 22-28, 2008.
