In Pennsylvania 12, so far the state shows 77,410 votes cast in the Democratic primary for Congress and 43,614 in the Republican primary—43% of them for 2008 Republican nominee William Russell, who pointedly did not endorse special election Republican candidate Tim Burns. Thus the electorate in the 12th special election consisted of almost twice as many registered Democrats as registered Republicans. More important, I suspect, is that the primary/special election evidently didn’t bring out the kind of voters who put this traditionally Democratic district (narrowly) in the McCain column in 2008: tradition-minded Democrats who didn’t like Obama and never much liked Republicans but who felt obliged to vote out of civic duty. They didn’t, or so my theory goes, feel compelled to vote in the Specter-Sestak primary, between two liberals from the faraway Philadelphia area they didn’t have anything in common with, and they didn’t feel compelled to vote in the Pennsylvania 12 special between a Democrat who took care to distance himself from Nancy Pelosi but was still a Democrat and a Republican who was a businessman conspicuously not endorsed by the retired military officer who was the party’s candidate 18 months ago. Tim Burns needed these votes, and might have gotten them if they had felt obliged to vote, one way or the other, for president; but he couldn’t get them to the polls.
Which is to say: Republicans can’t take for granted in 2010 tradition-minded Democrats who are sour on Obama and/or his policies. They may just not vote.
