440-Word Article: YOU CAN'T LOSE TO THE LOSER AND CLAIM TO BE A WINNER!
One of the oft-repeated claims in Republican politics regarding the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 General Election is that if only Republican Primary Voters chose differently, the party would have a better chance in the general.
It's true that not every primary winner is the best general election choice. Still, the losers of primaries were certainly not best positioned to have won the general elections in the same cycle, or else they would have first win the primary whose voters make up a large block needed to win the general election.
Case in point: 2.4 million people voted for Dr. Mehemt Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate general election last year, which came in large part from 1.4 million Republicans who voted in the primary; a primary that Dave McCormick lost by 951 votes. If Mr. McCormick couldn't find 951 votes among more than one million eventual general election Republicans (who mostly didn't even choose Trump’s candidate in the primary), then Mr. McCormick was not organized enough to have generated an extra 264,000 voters that Republicans needed to make up their General Election deficit. (Oz lost by this amount to John Fetterman.)
When one considers that primary voters make up a large junk of the general election vote, it throws into doubt the claim that "the primary is a different electorate." The independents and cross-over voters who give someone a win or a larger win are atop the candidate's own party voters showing up. You can't do poorly in your party and win. Candidates confident in their ability to win a general election if not for their party's "crazies" getting in the way during a primary, should run third party. The non-crazies of the party, independents, and cross-overs will carry the candidate to a win, yet this strategy generally fails because you can't lose to the loser by 951 votes among 1.4 million voters and claim to be a winner. (If Mr. McCormick is better organized for 2024 than he was in the past is not material to the point here of how that race and others played out. Candidates and their organizations can improve.)
The same can be said about Ron DeSantis for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. If he were to energize enough Republicans in the general election to actually win, he would first need to get many of those same Republicans in the primary. If he can't pull off the primary, too many Republicans may stay home for the general and, lead to a loss. It happens even to Primary Election winners. Just look at Dr. Oz 2022 and Trump 2020.
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Well put. I like!
I understand your point, but PA's 2022 US Senate race was NOT the example to use. If anything, our primaries illustrate how much candidate choice does matter, and how profoundly they are failing to resonate with the voters.
PA is a closed primary state, so only those registered as Democrats or Republicans can vote in the primary. I’m using the 2022 data from Montgomery County, PA website as my example because I live here.
In 2022, there were 607,301 registered voters in Montgomery County, PA.
Of those voters, 510,386 voters were eligible to vote in the Democrat or Republican primary election. 135,089 did – a paltry 26.5% of those eligible, or 22.2% of the total registered voters.
The results for the 2022 US Senate Primary Elections for Montgomery County, PA were:
2022 TOTAL REGISTERED DEMOCRATS in Montgomery County = 304,890
Total primary voters = 65,984 (21.6% of the total registered Democrats)
Fetterman won the Democrat primary in this county with 34,211 votes, which is 11.2% of those registered to vote in the Democrat Primary. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
2022 TOTAL REGISTERED REPUBLICANS in Montgomery County = 205,496
Total primary voters = 69,105 (33.6% of the total registered Republicans)
Barnette won the Republican primary in this county with 24,147 votes, which is 11.8% of those registered to vote in the Republican Primary. Again, hardly a ringing endorsement. (FWIW: Oz received 20,646 votes, and McCormick 16,349 votes).
But those numbers are worth considering. In the 2022 US Senate Primary Elections for Montgomery County, PA, LESS THAN 12% of those eligible to vote in either party’s primary election voted for the candidate who won the county primary election.
To my eye, that means the largest block of voters are the 74.5% who are registered as Democrat or Republican but are not voting in their party’s primary elections. Presumably they didn’t vote in the primary because they either did not know or were not enthused by their choices.