Did Rush Limbaugh Really Influence Hillary's Vote?

Posted by Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet at 4:16 PM on March 7, 2008.

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh is influential. He is the nation's most important radio host, according to Talkers magazine. And he's a great showman, urging Republicans to cross party lines and vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) in the Democratic Primary in Texas and Ohio. It's classic political talk radio.

"I want Hillary to stay in this, Laura," Rush told Laura Ingraham on Feb. 29, near the start of his Hillary crusade. "This is too good a soap opera. We need Barack Obama bloodied up politically, and it's obvious that the Republicans are not going to do it and don't have the stomach for it, as you probably know."

And on Wednesday, the day after the Texas Primary, there was this exchange on Fox News, where Clinton was the guest and was asked if she owed Limbaugh a thank you for a primary victory.

HILLARY: Be careful what you wish for, Rush.

WOMAN: Is that it?

HILLARY: I think that's it.

Later that day, Limbaugh played that mesmerizing exchange on his show and then said, "How do you interpret this, folks? She could have said thank you. She could have said thank you! In fact, I was expecting in her victory speech last night, to be thanked.

"I helped give Mrs. Clinton the biggest and happiest moment and night of the campaign season so far, maybe her life, and she tells me, "Be careful what you wish for, Rush"? Why, that sounds like a threat, does it not? I've got a Democrat presidential candidate threatening your host. Why, I am stunned! After all I did..."

This is fun, entertaining radio, but that does not make it true.

Political observers who know a thing or two more about Texas than Rush say there is no way he gave Clinton a decisive push that helped her beat Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) in the Lone Star State's primary by 101,000 votes.

"I really don't think so," said Matt Engle of The Lone Star Project. "I know it's a popular thing to think about. But I don't want to give Rush that credit. It is a hard thing to do, getting people to cross over party lines. There weren't all that many who did it. I haven't seen evidence to the contrary."

But this story line does not want to disappear.

"It matches the reality of the poll numbers," said Tony Campbell, spokesperson of Republicans for Obama. "Obama was up one or two points in Texas. But the spread was much larger than the what the polls showed. The polls were Democratic Primary voters. It had nothing to do with Republicans that would cross over."

Why then did Obama not win the Texas primary, which is daytime voting that awards two-thirds of the state's delegates? (The other third of the delegates are apportioned from party caucuses held after polls close. Clinton won the primary, 51 percent to 47 percent, but Obama is ahead in the caucus, 56 percent to 44 percent. The state party has not released the final caucus results, which, if they hold up, would give Obama more Texas delegates than Clinton.)

There are plenty of reasons why Obama did not win the state's Primary, but the biggest one cited by several Texas politicos is the he did not firmly respond to Clinton's attacks. Still, there certainly were voters who mischievously crossed party lines.

Laura Jean Kreissl is an accounting professor at Western Texas A&M University. She's an Obama supporter, and was a poll worker on Tuesday in Canyon, Texas, which she described as the "reddest of the red" politically. She contacted The Wall Street Journal after she counted 70 out of 181 voters come into her precinct, saying they were voting for Hillary because Rush suggested they do so.

"The first person I had (coming into vote) said Rush Limbaugh sent me. I'm here to vote for Hillary Clinton," she recounted on Friday. "I want to see the Democratic Party implode. And the next fellow behind him said, 'Me too!'"

Kreissl said these were the first two voters of the day.

"I was surprised," she said. "I never was an election official before. I like to think the best of people." The accounting professor decided to keep track of this peculiar trend. "They all wanted to know if they would be able to vote Republican in the fall Some comments were let's jump to the Democratic side and mess it up."

This is a compelling story. It is just as gripping as Limbaugh's well-staged theatrics. But the bottom line is the number of Republicans necessary to change the Democratic Primary outcome is much larger than the 70 people who voted in Canyon's precinct 307.

Assume for a minute those 70 voters in her ultra red precinct had comrades across Texas -- then the Canyon scenario would have had to have happened in nearly 1,450 other Texas precincts to create Clinton's 101,000 vote margin. That is one-fifth of its precincts.

If there was a Texas-size stampede by Limbaugh-induced Republicans, the state and national media -- to say nothing of the Obama campaign -- would have noted it. But that doesn't mean there were not crossover voters; just not enough for bragging rights.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on March 5th that in several Ohio counties, Republicans apparently did cross over to vote for Clinton. In Clermont County, a conservative rural area southwest of Cincinnati, 11,783 more people voted in the Democratic Primary than there were registered Democrats in the county. In nearby Warren County, there were 15,415 more people voting in the Democratic Primary than registered Democrats in the county.

Were crossover voters a factor in Ohio? Yes, but remember, Clinton beat Obama by 10 percent, which was a margin of nearly 229,000 votes.

It wasn't Limbaugh sheep being herded to the polls that defeated Obama in these states, it was Clinton's wolfish campaign ads and criticisms -- and the Obama campaigns responses or lack thereof.