How the Right (and the Left) misread the Kentucky primary

News flash: Kentucky won't be a coin flip in November

Sigh ... just when you thought we were finally past the interminable presidential primary season in the 2012 election cycle, it reared its ugly head again on Tuesday night.

Not on the Republican side of the ledger, however.

Tuesday night, the political Twitterverse was in full hysteria over the relatively small majorities with which Barack Obama was claiming the Democratic primaries in Arkansas (where his opposition was Tennessee lawyer John Wolfe) and in Kentucky (where his opposition was a line on the ballot that read "uncommitted"). In both states, he drew just 58 percent of the vote.

Conservatives (and more than one media pundit) breathlessly declared this another sign of impending doom. Many on the left took to Twitter to counter that Obama was actually securing more votes than Mitt Romney. Both, as it happened, were totally absurd arguments, and you only need three pieces of information to figure that out.

Data Point #1: Kentucky voter registration, as of 5/22/2012

Democrats'1,646,927 (55.3 percent)
Republicans'1,122,447 (37.7 percent)
Other'210,635 (7.0 percent)

Data Point #2: Self-Identified Party ID, 2008 exit polls

Democrats'47 percent
Republicans'38 percent
Other'15 percent

Data Point #3: Presidential vote by Party ID, 2008 exit polls

Democrats'Obama 69, McCain 30
Republicans'McCain 90, Obama 10
Other'McCain 58, Obama 38

Let's start with why these data points make the "Obama is dooooooomed" talking point look awfully silly. What should jump out immediately is that, on Election Day 2008, nearly one-third of Democrats in Kentucky voted against Barack Obama. While that was incrementally worse than Arkansas, it is essentially the same as how Obama performed (or underperformed) in West Virginia. West Virginia, of course, was another recent locale where the right-wing (and obliging media members) hyperventilated over the outcome of the Democratic primary.

President Obama, of course, lost all three of those states. And, to the apparent shock of the right and their enablers in the punditocracy, he is going to lose all three of them in 2012, barring a complete implosion for Team Romney.

Look instead, however, at a competitive Southern state: North Carolina. President Obama took just shy of 80 percent of the Democratic primary vote there earlier this month. Which was not dissimilar to what he has done in non-Southern primary contests.

Obama doesn't need, nor will he get, the first three states listed. But he really wants North Carolina. And his primary performance does nothing to dissuade the notion that he can win the state's 15 electoral votes. North Carolina, it is fair to say, is no less "Southern" than Arkansas, Kentucky, or West Virginia.

One thing that separates North Carolina from the other three, besides their competitiveness, is a matter, quite simply, of race. Arkansas whites (68-30 McCain) did not vote dramatically differently than did North Carolina whites (64-35 McCain). Heck, Kentucky whites were actually incrementally more amenable to Obama (63-36 McCain), and West Virginia whites were quite a bit more favorable for Obama (58-40 McCain).

So, what's the difference? Twenty-three percent of the North Carolina electorate was African-American. That roughly doubled up Arkansas (12 percent) and Kentucky (11 percent), and hugely eclipsed West Virginia (2 percent).

So, all we learned from this week's primaries was that Barack Obama has a Southern white voter problem. Which should not necessarily come as a surprise, really.

Southern white disaffection for this president is not exactly breaking news, and it is not going to get cured by November.

Nor does it need to be, because the most salient statistic from 2008 was that, despite getting smoked among Southern white voters, Barack Obama still won the presidency by eight million votes, winning 365 electoral votes in the process.

Therefore, conservative concern trolling about Barack Obama's less-than-stellar performances in primaries dominated by Southern white voters deserves little more than mild amusement. As a harbinger for November, it is next to useless.

But some on the Democratic side of the ledger cannot be acquitted for their analysis of the primaries this week, either.

Several good Democrats made a really bad argument in trying to push back on the "Obama is doomed" narrative that was flooding the zone on Twitter Tuesday night. Their counterpoint? "Obama has more votes than Romney tonight!"

Which, by the way, was absolutely true, in one of the two states. In Kentucky, Obama outpolled Romney, in terms of raw votes, by roughly 1,700 votes. In Arkansas, after the two were roughly even early in the night, Romney actually wound up outpolling the president by just under 8,000 votes.

But even if he had wound up with more votes in Arkansas than Romney, it couldn't have been any less relevant.

Consider some of the numbers downballot: In AR-04, the open seat abandoned by conservative Democratic Rep. Mike Ross, nearly 56,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary, while just over 35,000 voters chimed in on the Republican side. That works out to around a 61-39 Democratic edge. Yet absolutely no one thinks that the Democratic nominee (which will be decided by a June runoff) is even a 50/50 shot against Republican Tom Cotton.

Not all Democrats are created equal. Look at Kentucky: While 55 percent of the state is registered Democrat, Democrats have not done better than 46 percent of the vote there in well over a generation. Part of that is due to turnout disparities between the parties (note that Democrats have an 18-point registration advantage, but had only a 9-point edge on the 2008 exit polls), but part of that is due to the fact that these states have loads of ancestrally Democratic voters who cannot remember the last time they supported a Democrat at the federal level. They may be registered Democrats, but there is little chance that they're voting for Obama in November.

Ultimately, Obama outpolling Romney in Kentucky has infinitely more to do with two facts: the natural registration advantage in the state, and Kentucky's status as a closed primary, than it does with any statements of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the leading candidates.

One sincerely hopes, in the final analysis, that the flood of tweets and blog posts trying to divine "big lessons" from the southern primaries on Tuesday night were merely a function of it being somewhat of a dead period in the campaign cycle, and not legitimate attempts to attempt to define November by the events of May 22nd. To do so would be to ignore recent history (as in, didn't Obama win like 25 percent of the vote in the primaries in those states in 2008, and win in a landslide in November, anyway?). It would also veer dangerously close to cherry-picking data to fit a defined narrative.

It is no secret that the Right (and some pundits) are desperate to sell the "Obama defeat is inevitable" meme. Which is fine'it's their job. This would just be a pretty silly way to do it.