Essay: Primary Matters - 1/15/08

There has been a lot of talk in Michigan the last few weeks about “crossover voters.” This phrase is usually uttered in the sort of tones my grandmother would have used to say “cross-dressers.”

Crossover voters are people who are normally members of one party who will be crossing over to vote in the other side’s primary.

This year, that mostly means Democrats who are choosing to vote in the Republican primary. Some think there may be a lot of those, because the Democrats destroyed their own primary.

Republicans, especially Romney supporters, are mainly outraged by this. They seem to regard the idea of independent-minded people voting in their primary as some sort of blasphemy.

However, John McCain isn’t denouncing crossovers, since he stands to get most of them. That’s how he won the Michigan primary eight years ago. Mike Huckabee, the populist Christian conservative who loves Keith Richards, isn’t denouncing crossovers either.

He hopes to pick off any remaining NASCAR dads and blue-collar Southern Baptists who, for whatever reason, have still been voting for Democrats like Jennifer Granholm and John Kerry.

My guess is that he may well get both of their votes. Tomorrow, when the votes have been counted, the loser of the Republican primary may well blame crossover independents and Democrats.

Eight years ago, former Governor John Engler was positively whiny when his candidate, one George W. Bush, was beaten badly by McCain, due to what everybody saw as the crossover effect.

So now it’s time for me to remind us of something. How many registered Republicans do we have in this state? The answer is zero. How many registered Democrats are there? Again, zero.

Officially, we have seven million independent voters. We have no party registration in this state, and never have had. And I suspect most of us like that just fine. We have always had a higher percentage than average of independent-minded cusses who like to make up their own minds, politically and otherwise.

We are a state of ticket-splitters. Most of us like to think we vote for the candidate, not the party. Republican State Chair Saul Anuzis didn’t complain when many thousand Democrats who didn’t like Geoffrey Fieger voted for John Engler ten years ago.

And while he won’t talk about it, he knows that many thousands of normally Republican voters are going to go for Carl Levin this November. I am very much against anyone trying to sabotage either party’s ticket.

That is dangerous and unpatriotic, and can backfire.

I am old enough to remember gleeful Ann Arbor liberals voting for Ronald Reagan in a Republican presidential primary.

“He’d be their weakest candidate. Nobody is going to vote for a washed-up right-wing actor,” I was told. The movie had a different ending. But I think we should all feel free to vote in either party’s primary for the candidate we think would make the best president.

For regardless of your politics... wouldn’t voting for the best person for the job be a welcome change?

Hear Audio Story   

Comments

[Any Salyer]

I felt like I got mugged by Republicans.

Here in Troy, the folks who decide these things moved polling to churches. I get to vote at St. Anastasia.

Ick.

I regret I voted, for the first time ever, even though I reckoned it never meant much.

Here, our church folk decided to "save the children" and move the vote from public buildings to churches. (Yep, never ever heard that school kids were snatched by voters, but... Hey! Elvis lives!)

We used to congregate in a hallway in the school. Now we get to be frozen outside a church waiting to vote.
I'm not sure, but I'd never heard that children were abducted willy-nilly on election day, even though there were a lot of Republican party ninnies saying nonsense like that after the Blackwell Ohio fiasco and K. Harris Florida crap.

I went to cast my meaningless vote and heard the poll workers apologize to me because things were very screwed-up because of the picture ID checks, and other "improvements" (Thank you, Republican technocrat Terry Land, although you were not the only source of our problems) and the fact that St. Anastasia Church would not allow poll workers in for training and nobody really knew what to do, nor cared very much, it seemed, reminded me that although I'm not a Democratic Party member, I am sickened by the GOP idiocy and bias in my neighborhood.

I'm ashamed that I don't know where they store the vote scanning machines nor who has access to them here-abouts. I'd like to think that everything's okey-dokey, but it doesn't seem so.

I have the impression that you don't see it the way I do, comrade Lessenberry, but to me, it still seems a really big horrible problem.

The awful truth is that neither party seems to care for much about us. What do you reckon?

[Jack Lessenberry]

I am glad you voted. No, the bureaucrats who run the parties don't care enough about us. So we must look for those who do.

[Alan Goldsmith]

As a dangerous and unpatriotic Ann Arbororite Democrat who crossed over and voted for McCain in 2000 (and thus making sure John Engler didn't end up in the Bush cabinet...yes!) I couldn't bring myself to be so brave this time around. Ended up voting for Clinton because she didn't pull her name and being outranged at the Michigan Democratic Party for the way they bungled the entire primary process.

[Anonymous]

Any Salyer, if I understand you correctly, you seem to think that the reason that election polling was moved to churches in your area was because mean-spirited and religiously-obsessed Republican religious nuts insisted on it. Have I got that right?

You need to get out a little more. I have voted in a church, going back to the days of Jimmy Carter. (You remember him, right? That Baptist religious fanatic from the backwater of south Georgia?)

You especially need to visit the city of Detroit, a 90%+ Democrat fortress of political homogeneity. There, about a third of the polling places, particularly some of the larger polling places, are in churches. Many Detroit churches serve as polling places for three or four different precincts.

So much for your religious-right conspiracy theory. Or don't Democrat churches count?

[Any Salyer]

Anonymous, elections in my city were moved in recent memory from public buildings to churches. There was nothing wrong, but there was a campaign to fix things. In this particular instance, things were changed for the worse by a Republican crowd, everything from the clamoring for picture IDs to the moving of polling places.