Did Joe Sestak’s Surge Save Mark Critz? (Crunching the Numbers in PA-12)

Talking to an NRCC guy who’s looked at last night’s numbers extensively, he concludes that the polls and expectations in Pennsylvania’s special election were thrown off not merely by the competitive Democratic Senate primary, but particularly by Joe Sestak’s surge in the final two weeks.

Committee strategists worried about the effect of the Senate primary at first, but as they started getting polling numbers back, they suspected the special election would be the chief driver for turnout in this part of the state. Until the beginning of May or so, that seemed to be the case. But in the final weeks, Sestak’s surge — driven by massive amounts of television advertising, hitting Specter for his ties to George W. Bush — drove a sudden burst of interest in voting among the Democratic base. This analyst thinks these Sestak-driven voters amounted to about 8,000 to 10,000 voters, roughly the size of Critz’s margin of victory. The Sestak-surge-driven Democrats turned out because they were determined to toss out Specter; they were more liberal and more partisan than your average district Democrat. Thus, Tim Burns, who usually ran well among Democrats, in the neighborhood of 20 percent, probably only won about 15 percent of Democrats last night.

This NRCC number-cruncher notes that on paper, the Republicans did have high-intensity turnout; they outperformed the highest Republican level of turnout for a primary – although that’s not the highest bar to clear; since Murtha usually appeared untouchable, GOP primaries in this district weren’t usually big affairs, with 20,000 to 26,000 votes. The Republicans brought out 45,000 votes and expected the Democrats to bring out about 60,000 votes. (If Burns took 20 percent of that, and kept most of the Republican vote, he would win handily.)

This NRCC number-cruncher isn’t drawing a ton of conclusions from this race yet, but he wonders if there’s a need for Republicans to be wary of poll numbers indicating rural, red-state, or coal-country Democrats are turning against the party they traditionally support: “We can’t take that at face value. We’ve got to have a little cynicism about those numbers, because these are folks who have been voting for Democrats for decades, and their moms and dads were voting for Democrats for decades before that. They don’t just jump across that easily.”

Johnnie:

In my reply number 47 also addressed to you, I tried to crunch some of the numbers. The source of those numbers I exerpt here from the original post

(http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2516748/posts?page=1#1):

"Indeed when all the votes were tallied, 80, 736 were cast in the Democrat primary and only 45, 852 in the GOP Primary. The results from the primary and general election for PA-12 appears below via Fox News:

U.S. House - District 12 - Democrat Primary: Critz, Mark: 57,704 Bucchianeri, Ryan: 16,618 Mackell, Ronald: 6,414 Total Votes Cast: 80,736

U.S. House - District 12 - Republican Primary

Burns , Tim GOP: 26,120 Russell , William GOP: 19,732 Total Votes Cast: 45,852

U.S. House - District 12 - Special General Critz, Mark: 70,662 Burns, Tim: 60,500 Agoris, Demo: 3142 Total Votes Cast: 134,304"

This is where I got the data from which to conclude that Critz got only 87.5% of the primary ballots cast for his general election but Burns got 133% of the Republican primary ballots cast in his general election. That means that Burns got a ton of independents and he got a ton of Democrats.

I think those numbers portend better for a national analysis than they do for a redo of the PA 12 election in November because if the Democrats across-the-board are slipping and Republicans are picking up the independents and many Democrats, there are a lot of districts which do not have a two to one Democrat advantage where Republicans will expect to win.

The unknowable is the degree to which there is real intensity on the Republican side. I am not comforted by the weak turnout by Republicans even though the Democrats alone had the seriously contested Senate race. This was the only real election and the Republicans should have shown a better turnout I think. That makes me question whether the intensity is as strong as we think.

The statement only goes for the extreme case where a conservative democrat would be better then the Republican RINO. This will not likely be the case in most districts and states in mid term elections. However, I also believe that the so-called blue dog Democrats were bullied by the Far-left leadership of the Dems. this being the case (and I am not escusing the spine-less actions of blue-dogs), if and when we decapitate the Dem leadership in the Senate, and hopefully in te House, maybe the blue-dogs will come out of there dens.

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