Rough News for McCain on Dems' Big Night?
If you are a Republican stalwart tonight in Indiana or North Carolina, you turn up to show your support for your presumptive nominee. If you vote for another GOP no-longer-hopeful, you're sending another message: that you're rather displeased that John McCain is leading your party.
There's a long way to go in counting up the N.C. and Indiana ballots, but in both places, it's striking how many Republican voters are expressing their dislike for McCain.
Check out Indiana where at this hour, with about 70% of the vote turned in statewide, about 30,000 voters cast ballots for Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, or Ron Paul. While it's possible to dismiss a portion of the Paul people as not traditional Republican voters, Huckabee and Romney together still account for more than half of that total. When all of these votes are collected, they are about 1/4 of the total Republican vote count right now. A lot of Republicans in a staunchly red state are not yet convinced that John McCain is the candidate for them.
In North Carolina, the picture is different, but similar enough. The state's total count so far is smaller, but about 26% of the Republican voters who cast ballots chose Huckabee, Paul, Alan Keyes, and the worst of all, no preference (almost 4%). Hundreds of thousands turned out for McCain, true. Still, tens of thousands turned out to vote against him.
Indy and North Kackalacka are both reliable red states; that so many are turning out to express their disapproval for McCain is bad news, because in real battleground states, Republican stalwarts may find themselves even less likely to turn out if their feelings are similar.
To be fair, McCain can resolve some of this situation. By picking a VP like Huckabee, he can allay the worries of social conservatives who are probably the base that is voting against the senator. But it's going to take much harder work for the "maverick" Republican to persuade a fair portion of his party's voters that they need to turn out and cast their ballots for him in November. And that's fraught with peril because the more Republican he will look, and the less maverick he will appear to the independents and purported "McCain Democrats" who would be required to push him over the line.
Bottom line: put that pessimism away. John McCain is not going to have an easy time with his own party.
