A comment from Stan

Following up on a recent column on the Pennsylvania primary by Frank Rich of the New York Times in which he pointed out that the media generally are ignoring the Republican primaries, we note this morning that in the North Carolina primary yesterday, McCain is a loser in at least two ways. First the totals. The Democrats posted votes from 1,575,561 voters against 518,224 Republicans who made it to the polls. That’s close to a three to one margin. The numbers from Indiana were similar.

Now it should be pointed out that the Republican race is demonstrably over and therefore voter motivation among Republicans is down. But if you look at the internals, as the commentariat calls it these days, 62,917 of those Republicans voted for Mike Huckabee, 40,275 for Ron Paul, and 33,894 for unstated others. All told, 137,086 of the Republican voters found motive to send McCain a message, more than twenty-six percent of the total.

Again, that’s a vote internal to the Republican party and it could well be that some number of those will accept party discipline and support the candidate in the general election. On the other hand, they may be people who will bolt the party in the general election. But then remember the months long beating the radio and TV commentators gave McCain as not an acceptable candidate. He may not recover.

So it may be that the electorate is so fed up with Republican power grabbing and duplicity that it will sweep the party out of office.

Let us hope so.