although louisiana does have democratic office holders, in presidential contests it's a pretty red state. bush won the state by 14 points in 2004 and almost 8 points in 2000.
but look at what happened yesterday: huckabee won the republican primary, getting more votes than john mccain the presumptive nominee. and yet the republican winner still got less than half of the votes of clinton, the loser in the democratic contest. and obama got about three times as many votes as huckabee.
viewing the two votes together, yesterday was a total democratic blowout in terms of turnout. even though she lost to obama by a large margin, the democratic loser still got more votes than all the republican candidates combined. considering LA is a red state, that is really remarkable. and it bodes extremely well for the democrats in the general election.
there are some problems with my methodology. maybe the turnout was less in LA yesterday because the republican contest was already considered to be over for some people. but we saw a similar phenomenon in south carolina several weeks ago when the republican contest was far from over.
the reason i am focusing on the LA race is because it's a primary state (and not a caucus) which is closer to how the vote will be in the november election. also because it's a "red state" in presidential elections which (unlike south carolina) held both the democratic and republican primaries on the same day. thus any turnout differences between the parties can't be attributed to weather or anything like that.
the primaries suggest that no matter who is the nominee, the democrats are heading towards a blowout victory in the fall. even if it's a clinton-mccain match up, the one that national polls suggests would be the hardest for the dems to win, the democratic party is going to have a clear advantage in terms of turnout. unless, of course, they manage to screw it up.
which we can't ever rule out. we are talking about the democratic party, after all.
