Some final thoughts from Virginia’s presidential primary:
* All night long, we’ve been looking at McCain’s relatively weak showing against Huckabee. But as the final numbers come in, McCain has edged, once again, over 50 percent. And he’s winning with about 55 percent of the vote in Maryland right now. So I wonder, come the morning, how much his relatively unimpressive Virginia margin is going to matter? (It won’t matter on the delegate count; the Old Dominion is winner-take-all on the GOP side). University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato says it’ll matter a lot to Republican insiders; he says some worry that in McCain they’re nominating another Bob Dole. We’ll see. Democratic strategist Paul Goldman thinks this was Huckabee’s Gettysburg.
* By the same token, how much will Obama’s margins start to matter in the opposite direction? The Clinton people had been downplaying Virginia, saying, well, that’s an Obama state. Maybe so, but that’s quite a landslide for Obama. If you had told me a month ago that Clinton would have gotten wiped out in Northern Virginia and been reduced to relying on Southwest Virginia, I’d have thought you were crazy. For two candidates who have been evenly matched nationally, this 64-35 split is a pretty stunning margin. Obama has now won eight states in a row, and by some pretty thunderous margins. See the earlier post with the Paul Goldman quote about how Texas could be Clinton’s Alamo. I’m betting we might see a lot of pundits using that line in the days ahead.
* What does the turn-out mean? More than 900,000 people -- maybe close to 1 million -- have voted in the Democratic primary. That’s about 20 percent turn-out. By contrast, the turnout in the Democratic primary in 2004 was only 9 percent. You can go back to the first big Super Tuesday primary in 1988, and even then the turnout was only 14 percent on the Democratic side. So this is a quantum leap for the Democrats.
On the Republican side, umm, not so much. Looks like about 450,000 or so have voted, or just under 10 percent. That’s down from 17 percent in the 2000 primary where George W. Bush defeated John McCain. Interestingly, that year Bush took almost 53 percent of the vote and that was considered a pretty decisive win. So if McCain winds up close to that, maybe his total isn’t as bad as some have feared.
There’s certainly no doubt that this year’s primary has put Virginia on the map, not just nationally, but even internationally. My 12-year-old son just called in from Bolivia to get an update on the results, which he says he’ll announce at his school tomorrow (he’s there on an exchange trip).
The candidates are now off to the next round of states -- Wisconsin and Hawaii, then Texas and Ohio on March 4. I wonder if we’ll see any of them around these parts again in the fall?
-- Dwayne Yancey, Senior Editor
Comments
[February 13, 2008 3:47 PM]
Mike S.Always interesting how things play out in Virginia. From a T-D story graphic today, it looked like the state was split in half. Here's a good read on the Richmond side of things: http://www.richmond.com/news-features/23521