Did Bob Anderson Help Michele Bachmann or El Tinklenberg in 2008?

Taxpaying Liberal believes Bob Anderson helped El Tinklenberg:

To view the real effect of the IP vote you should look at the results of the up ticket candidates.

In the 2008 race this means looking at Obama and Tinklenberg compared to McCain- Bachmann.

I did have time to go to the SOS website so I may be off a little on the totals but Tinkleberg received more votes than Obama by a couple of percentage points. Bachmann underperformed McCain by about 7% Anderson underperformed Barkley by almost 10%.

What does this mean? It means that El got the entire base and almost no vote defected to Bachmann and 7% of the Republican vote defected from McCain to IP.

If IP had received 3% more vote it is likely we would be Bachmann free.

Bachmann knows this. That may be why you see her courting the “Ron Paul” vote.

Now I know that some will look at this and say that if Anderson wasn’t in the race then those McCain drop offs would have moved to El and maybe you’re right, but they would have had to vote over 2 to 1 in that direction and that is unlikely to have occurred.

And if Bachmann had received 54 to 55% of the vote instead of the 50.04% her seat would be considered safe or safer this election and far less likely to be as much of a target has it clearly will be this election.

For those of you who think that it was an IP voter that voted for Anderson let me once again go to the up ticket and compare Anderson to Barkley. Barkley received almost double (once again I didn’t look up the exact number for this post) the votes for Anderson. Here again is an example of major ticket splitting.

There are a lot of factors involved and its fun to run the numbers and speculate about them.
But the biggest factor is as Amy proved the candidate that is the most important factor. Bachmann can be beat and running a good race against her and being for something are going to be the biggest reason we win or lose.
taxpaying liberal