Marc Ambinder flags this DNC memo (PDF) that touts the impressive gains Democrats have made in turnout this primary season. But this turnout is, in part, simple proof that this primary has taken a different course than previous primaries. First of all, it's not surprising, as the memo notes, that "comparing 2008 Republican turnout to the last contested Republican primary in 2000, Republican turnout either stayed relatively stagnant or decreased." In both years the Republican nominee was decisively determined relatively early on. They were comparable races with comparable results. By contrast the Democrats have been going at this for nearly five months, with neither candidate yielding, which is quite unlike 2004, where Kerry was crowned almost immediately after Iowa. Turns out more people vote when their vote matters.
All of this is to underscore that you simply can't use primary results to make a general election argument. The only meaningful comparison is to use polling data that pits a Democrat against a Republican. After Tuesday's primaries the conventional wisdom coalesced around Barack Obama being the Democratic nominee, which means it's time to take a closer look at the hypothetical match-ups between him and John McCain. According to Gallup, which has been tracking these numbers, Obama's support, broken down demographically, starts to look a lot like John Kerry's performance among Democrats in the 2004 general election (a point I have made here before). The good news is that McCain does worse in every demographic compared to how Bush fared in '04, save church attendance (McCain outperforms Bush in the "occasionally" and ties in the "never" categories). Obama does better than Kerry did among black voters, college graduates and postgraduates (unsurprisingly), but Obama does worse in every other category.
Another way to look at this is by directly comparing performance between Obama-McCain and Kerry-Bush. Obama does better against McCain than Kerry did against Bush in every category except church attendance. Obama does better in weekly attendance (losing by 19 instead of 22 points), but does worse by a 12-point margin in the "occasionally" category and seven points in the "never" category (which he still wins handily, by the way). Adjusting the percentages each of these demographics represent in the general public ought to give us a rough sense of the probable electoral outcome, or at least as good as we're going to get fully six months before Election Day. For now, Gallup has Obama leading John McCain by one point, 46%-45%. That's considerably shakier than the DNC's turnout numbers would have you believe.
--Mori Dinauer
