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July 15, 2004
What Happened To Cynthia?
There is a lot of lofty rhetoric and few facts regarding the 4th Congressional District Primary in 2002. Republicans acknowledge that there was some "crossover" voting while McKinney's allies blame it for her defeat. Well...
Majette beat McKinney by 19,554 votes. An analysis of previous primary votes, looking at the 2000 and 1998 general primaries and the 2000 presidential primary shows that of the 113,356 people that voted in the Majette/McKinney race, 25,761 people had voted in a Republican primary in the previous 4 years. While this number is larger than Majette's margin, 10,572 of those voters had chosen a Democratic ballot before, and 9,154 of them had most recently voted in a Democratic Primary.
That leaves 16,607 who had chosen a Republican ballot in the previous primary they voted in, and only 15,189 who had never voted in a Democratic primary. Both of these numbers are less than Majette's margin.
Now for the Democrats. 52,667 of the 113,356 voters had grabbed a Democratic ballot in previous primaries, 51,249 of them had voted D in the most recent election they participated in, and 42,095 hadn't voted in any Republican primaries.
So what group of voters swung this district, enabling a challenger to McKinney to win where others had failed in the previous elections? New primary voters made up a whopping 45,500, a share equal to 40.1%, greater than the number of solid Democratic voters who showed up.
And you might be surprised who these new primary voters were. 24,170 were African American and only 20,111 were white. And what did these new primary voters do in the presidential primary this year? Of those that voted, they broke more than 3:1 as Democrats.
What's my prediction for 2004? Without Republican crossover, I'll predict a runoff. With Republican crossover I'll still go with a runoff because Woolard is coming on strong this last week and will deny Levetan a lot of liberal white voters on the first ballot. And as far as a runoff goes, it is very hard to say. If those 20,111 white voters who didn't vote in primaries before 2002 don't vote this year they can still show up in a runoff, but if they vote Republican they'll be stuck in that runoff. We just won't know for a while.
Posted by Chris at July 15, 2004 01:52 PM
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