Rushing to Register? Limbaugh’s efforts not yet showing signs of big effects in Pennsylvania

The Christian Science Monitor
"Rushing to register? Limbaugh’s efforts not yet showing signs of big effects in Pennsylvania"
By Dante Chinni
March 27th, 2008

In the Christian Science Monitor on March 27th, there was a really interesting article that was different from the other articles I've read. Instead of being about the pressing issues of the campaign or even about the candidates themselves, this article was about a neoconservative radio show host's effort to sabotage the Democratic party by urging Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama in the upcoming Pennsylvania primary. The reason? So that the Democratic party stays divided longer and gives the Republicans a greater advantage going into the actual election for President.

In PA you have to be a registered Democrat to vote in the primary, unlike some other states, and so far 51,000 people have switched to vote in the Democratic primary, and there are still three days left to register! Mr. Chinni, the author of the article, looked closer at this data and determined that if the switches came in heavily conservative areas they very well could be Limbaugh people, whereas if the switches came from more liberal areas their switch was most likely unrelated. The results were that about 23,000 of those switches were in counties that had previously voted for Bush, so were more conservative, an interesting find.

Despite all this, it is really hard to determine how much of an impact Limbaugh's open sabotage plan will have the election.

One possibility that the author didn't cover is that many of those switches could come from voters who don't want to elect another Republican after 8 years of a disastrous Republican President.

The article quoted two 'experts' who were both men, and the article itself was written by a man. The article had minimal framing and was purely presenting the facts.