Posted by WLS:
Update 5/14: Final raw vote tallies:
Clinton 2008 — 238,939
Obama 2008 — 91,613
Kerry 2004 — 175,065
Which brings me back to my question yesterday — if Obamania is so irresistable, why was he able to tally only 52% of the vote total that Kerry tallied in 2004?
The 2004 primary was meaningless to the nomination of Kerry, just as the press has said the 2008 primary was meaningless to the nomination of Obama.
Kerry was as liberal as Obama, and with his haughty boarding school upbringing and elitist Brahmin-esque manner, should have been stepped on by Edwards in the same manner Clinton stepped on Obama yesterday.
Yet Kerry was able to rally the party to him on his way to getting 175,065 votes in the primary, on the way to getting 326,541 votes in the general.
That was an increase of 151,476 votes.
For Obama to equal Kerry’s raw vote in W.Va. in the general election, he’s going to have to find 234,928 more votes than he did yesterday — a quarter million more W.Virginians will have to pull the lever for Obama in Nov. than were willing to do so yesterday.
Assuming McCain runs within 10% of Bush’s raw vote total in 2004 — giving McCain 381,400 votes in Nov. — Obama would need to find 289,787 more votes than he tallied yesterday to win W.Va.
If McCain performs even with Bush’s 2004 totals, Obama needs to find 332,165 more votes than he got yesterday.
I’ll have a post up later that compares Obama’s raw vote totals in key battleground states in the rust belt against Kerry’s raw vote totals in primaries of those same states.
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The polls will be closing in WVa in two hours. Within a couple hours after that we will know the raw vote totals for Obama and Clinton.
Everyone is predicting a Clinton blowout victory, and it will not be a surprise if she wins by 25 points.
What I want to see, however, is the raw vote total for Obama. As the Clinton campaign surrogates have pointed out, Obama is the front-runner and the press has annointed him the presumptive nominee. If the party is going to rally around him, there should be some evidence of that now, and there is no good explanation for why it would not be seen to be happening in WVa. That was supposedly the message from his blowout win in NC last week, and he very narrow loss in Indiana.
He has outspent Clinton on paid advertising in WVa, he has more offices and more paid campaign staff in the state, and he has the endorsements of the two most prominent elected Democrats — and I’m not considering Sen. Byrd due to his poor health.
So, why are the Dems of WVa not getting behind him?
In 2004, the presumptive nominee of the Dem. party came to WVa and garnered 175,065 votes, or 69.25%, with his nearest challenger garnering only 33,950.
The Dem race for the nomination was over by May 11, 2004, the date of the 2004 primary, but the Dem race this year is pretty much over — none of the punditocracy sees a straightforward way for Clinton to win.
Yet in 2004, 175,000 faithful Dem voters still turned out and voted for the ultra-liberal elitist junior Senator from Massachusetts.
If Obama is the historic transitional political figure the press and the leftwing have claimed him to be, why would he not be able to generate the same raw vote totals of a rather dull, unexciting, French-looking New Englander who had wrapped up the nomination in 2004 a full two months before the WVa primary?
If Obama can’t get the same 175,000 votes in WVa. that Kerry did, why not? Even if Clinton beats him, why would his vote total be less than Kerry’s? These are registered DEM voters — they should be predisposed to the presumptive nominee of their party who is proclaimed as a gift from the gods of politics.
Why are they voting for someone who has no chance of being their nominee? Why didn’t those same voters pull the lever for John Edwards in 2004?