Primary Memory Lane

Remember all those arguments that we heard during the primaries?

Hillary wins the big states.

Hillary wins the swing states necessary for Democrats to win in November (implying that Obama won't win those states).

Obama can't get the white blue-collar vote.

Clinton supporters won't vote for Obama.

The supposed snubbing of Michigan and Florida in the primaries will be big problems for Democrats in the general election.

Just goes to show what many of us argued all along: you can't conclude much about general election results from primary results.

The idea that if people prefer A to B, then they won't prefer B to C was fallacious from the start. Perhaps intuitively attractive, but logically fallacious. We can't know if Clinton would have done better or worse than Obama in the general election, but we do know that his loss to Clinton in Ohio primary did not prevent him from winning Ohio against McCain. Or Pennsylvania. Or Florida. Or Indiana. Or New Hampshire. And he carried Virgina and North Carolina, states which might not have been as competitive if Clinton had been the nominee, though she probably would have had an easier time in Florida.

Most Clinton supporters came home to the party. Of course most of them would, just as most Obama supporters would have voted for Clinton if she had been the nominee. There was too much at stake for people not entirely wrapped up in the personality of the candidates to do otherwise.

The early primary controversies in Michigan and Florida turned out to be complete non-factors. Michigan wasn't even contested down the stretch, with the McCain campaign withdrawing from the state long before election day. Florida was close, but it was going to be so with Obama as the nominee regardless of what happened during the primaries. I've heard nothing to suggest that the Florida primary problems affected the final tallies in the general election.

As for the white blue-collar vote, Obama won white voters earning under $50,000 by 52% to 46% and received a greater percentage of the white vote than Gore and Kerry. And Pennsylvania, home of the blue-collar Clinton voter, was called very early on election night for Obama despite the concentrated efforts of the McCain campaign to wrest the state from the Democrats.

Sure, there may have been intervening factors that prognosticators weren't thinking about when they made their assertions during the primaries. The Palin selection may have pushed many Clinton supporters to Obama who might not otherwise have voted for him or stayed home. The financial crisis may have given Obama more heft with blue-collar voters than he would have had otherwise.

But I think it's hard to refute the assertion that many of the claims linking primary results to the general election were wrong. And it makes sense that they were wrong because they had little logical basis to begin with.

Do people who make assertions that turn out to be wrong ever admit their mistakes, or become more cautious about doing so in the future?