Mess With Texas

The numbers are undeniable.

With 99% of the votes in, it looks as though the number of votes in the Texas Democratic primary will match-or slightly exceed-John Kerry's Texas vote total for the 2004 general election.

Kerry received 2,832,704 votes in Texas in 2004. Clinton and Obama are at 2,807,811 between them so far, splitting the counted vote 51% to 48%.

I don't think that parallels to the Republican primary (Hillary got more votes than McCain!) are germane, due to one race being competitive and the other not. But SUSA has polled Texas a couple times and McCain didn't get above 50 (I can't find a link) against either Obama or Clinton. And the Hispanic turnout, if it's matched in a general election, makes Texas absolutely a swing state. Having Rick Noriega, who won his Senate primary convincingly yesterday, near the top of the ticket doesn't hurt.

The first thing that McCain said in response to a question today on where to use W. is that "he can help us in Texas." And Bush quickly shouted "We're going to win in a landslide in Texas!" Bush is uninformed. McCain isn't. They're going to have to campaign in Texas.

Of course, McCain also thinks that he can win in California, to which I say "Bring it on."

UPDATE: As for this disparity in the Texas vote being a function of Rush Limbaugh meddling and asking his fans to vote for Hillary to "bloody up Obama," there's not quite the data there for that yet, although this is interesting:

The undercount in the D primary was almost 700,000 ballots out of 2.86 million. By contrast, the undercount in the R primary was about 164,000 ballots out of 1.38 million. In the 2004 general election, the dropoff from president to railroad commissioner (the next race on the state ballot) was less than 400,000 out of 7.4 million.