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Michael Barone, whom everybody likes and respects, reports that the turnout in New York City's Democratic primary was not everything it could have been:
Total number of votes cast in the Democratic primary for mayor: 456,263. Pretty pathetic. For Manhattan borough president: 147,650, or 32 percent of the total for mayor. By comparison, the mayoral Democratic primary in 2001, two weeks after September 11, had a turnout of 785,365, and the 2001 runoff, four weeks later, had a turnout of 790,089. The 2005 Democratic turnout was down about 42 percent. Wow! This is out of 2,639,845 registered Democrats. In other words, about 30 percent of registered Democrats voted for mayor in the 2001 primary and runoff, while only 17 percent of registered Democrats voted for mayor this time.Doesn't sound like the [progressives] are making the kind of effort that you'd want to tell the grandkids about.
Is there any national significance to these numbers? Not much but maybe this. The kind of angry left-wing politics promoted by the Daily Kos and Howard Dean seems to dominate the Democrats' political dialogue. But when real things are at stake–like the value of your Manhattan co-op–a lot of Democratic voters know better. In Iowa and New Hampshire, they hurriedly dumped Dean for Kerry in 2004, and this year they simply have no interest at all in ousting Bloomberg for a left-wing Democrat.My friends over at Eschaton say that I'm a fool to believe that most Americans are conservative, but in America's largest city ---in the very heart of liberal sentiment and Big Media propaganda--- they just can't seem to get it up for the progressive agenda. What a shame that our two-party system is being betrayed by partisans unworthy of the name.