Jay Cost says that Clinton and McCain won their respective battles yesterday essentially by carrying on with what they did in New Hampshire. Michael Graham at NRO takes another cut at the numbers and finds McCain’s performance to be as little as half that of 2000:

John McCain…got 33% of the vote in a field where his top challengers — Romney and Giuliani — aren’t even running, and 135,000 actual votes. If just the same people who voted for McCain in 2000 had voted for him today, he would have won 50+% of the South Carolina vote. That would have been truly impressive. Instead, John McCain LOST the support of 100,000 people — and he’s the winner?

McCain had the same “success” in New Hampshire (McCain, 2000: 48%, 116,000 votes; McCain 2008: 37%, 89,000 votes) and Michigan (2000: 50%, 600,000 votes; 2008: 30%, 257,000 votes). Yes, overall participation in the GOP primaries is down this year — a fact that should concern Republicans regardless of who they choose as their nominee. But that doesn’t mitigate McCain’s overall weakness.

On top of all this is the obvious truce between certain campaigns. Can you buy the McCain-Huckabee “Strength and Faith 2008″ lawn signs yet?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.