June 27, 2003

MoveOn virtual primary

MoveOn.org has published the results of a virtual primary. It is, of course, not binding, and arguably doesn’t really mean anything: although MoveOn did go to some trouble to avoid ballot-box stuffing, there’s always that risk. MoveOn had already made nice noises about Howard Dean, and the voters would probably be sympathetic to MoveOn. MoveOn only gave three of the candidates an opportunity to address the voters in advance–it defined those three as the “front runners,” but those three are Howard Dean, John Kerry, and Dennis Kucinich (??), which is unrealistic. And sure enough, those three easily outpolled the others. Dean got over 40% of the vote. Kucinich, inexplicably, got over 20%.

The others got the dregs, and there wasn’t much for them to fight over. Carol Moseley-Braun outpolled Joe Lieberman, which strikes me as unrepresentative. Wesley Clark–who wasn’t even on the ballot–outpolled Al Sharpton. This is interesting: Sharpton doesn’t even have much cred among the dedicated left, and a recently retired general, who has made only vague noises about running, does. But I’m not sure what it signifies: has the left moved to the right? Does Clark appeal to a certain subset? Is he perceived as more viable today because of his military background?