archy

New Hampshire footnote
Atrios points out an interesting phenomenon in the primary results: ” ...a rather odd thing is the number of people who voted in the Republican primary, but wrote in the names of Democrats...”

I had to go look this one up. The full results from the primary show not only minor candidates, but write-ins as well. On the Democratic side, minor candidates and write-ins amounted to less than one percent. Bush got about one hundred votes (103, but a precincts haven’t reported as I write this). That’s less than on tenth of one percent. It’s easy to think of a few reasons why someone might enter a protest vote like that: Democrats strongly in favor of the war or mad at their party for some reason, independents who wanted to embarrass the Democrats, heavy drinking before voting.

Over on the Republican side 14.5 percent of the voters voted against Bush. More than half of those votes were write-ins for Democrats. Kerry got 2.3 percent of the Republican vote. Are that many Republicans that upset with their party? This is something that bears watching.