Primaries aren't like general elections

After weeks of bluster about Hillary Clinton's strength in key general election states, it's great to see the NYT's Patrick Healy make an obvious but crucial point (I've been repeating this for weeks):

[T]he Pennsylvania exit polls, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for five television networks and The Associated Press, underscore a point that political analysts made on Wednesday: that state primary results do not necessarily translate into general election victories.

For more along these lines, see Josh Marshall, Jon Chait, and Matthew Yglesias.

In a separate post, Yglesias makes a closely related point that echoes my one of my running themes -- the fundamentals matter far more than the candidates themselves:

[I]t's important to remember that by far the biggest source of uncertainty about the November presidential election has to do not with the Democratic primary campaign, but with objective reality. I don't believe that the situation in Iraq or the economy will look radically better in November than they do today, but in principle either or both might. Something like that would make John McCain -- a popular and skilled politician who gets good press -- extremely hard to beat. But if the economy continues to be weak and Americans keep dying in a war that offers no light at the end of the tunnel, it's very hard for McCain to win. This kind of thing -- the inherent unknowability of things like the Q3 GDP growth rate and the future course of inflation, the possibility of new foreign crises or dramatic changes in Iraq -- is what makes the outcome uncertain. The differences, qua candidates, between Clinton and Obama are small in comparison to this haze of uncertainty.

In other words, the vote for Clinton or Obama in the fall will be portrayed as a reflection of their performance against John McCain but it's likely to be heavily driven by the state of the economy and Iraq.

Comments

[Jinchi]

I don't believe that McCain would be "extremely hard to beat" even if the economy and Iraq looked radically better.

It would definitely make it more likely that he'd win, but people get tired of the same party controlling the executive branch, even during peacetime and with a surging economy (see Gore, Al).