Maybe it's just me, but I'm going to miss the Democratic primaries. They were fun to watch.
I have a personal reason as well. I enjoy watching sports, but I've never been one to follow all the minute number crunching so beloved of the average hard-core sports fan. I've got some friends like that -- the kind that are always checking the latest scores on their cell phones to update their standings in whatever fantasy sports league has taken over their lives at the moment.
If you express an opinion on any particular game, player, or team, they'll throw a bunch of numbers and arcane information at you to irrefutably prove that you, pal, are WRONG!
The Democratic primaries gave me an opportunity to turn the tables on those guys. They were interested in the primaries, but not following them as closely as I was, allowing me to hold forth on the topic until somebody would emphatically change the subject.
(I can imagine you readers making a mental note, should you and I ever attend the same party, to immediately make a break for the bathroom if you see me approaching. Not a bad idea.)
As it happened, I had a bunch of my friends from New Jersey up to my place for a poker game on Saturday, and the talk turned to the primaries.
One of my friends speculated that this primary race must be taking a toll on the national Democratic Party. I told him that in Pennsylvania, at least, the opposite happened. Registration among Democrats actually went up.
I was in the York County voter's office on the deadline day for primary registration, and it was full of unregistered people signing up to vote as Democrats, and Republicans making the switch.
Democrats now have an edge of about a million voters in Pennsylvania.
More than 6,000 county residents signed up as Democrats in recent months, although York County Republicans still have a comfortable edge of about 35,000 registrations.
My friend said he thought conventional wisdom held that a drawn out primary hurts the party in question, because the candidates are out there tearing into each other.
And yeah, I told him, that's generally true. So why the registration increases among Democrats? I figure it's kind of the same phenomenon that gives both of the major parties a spike in the polls immediately after their respective conventions.
Actually, the analogy that occurred to me is what happened when VCRs first went on the market. A lot of industry analysts predicted that movie theaters would take a hit. It seemed pretty obvious, after all. Why would people go out to theaters when they could see entire movies, uncut and uninterrupted, in their own homes?
Counterintuitively enough, the exact opposite happened. The proliferation of VCRs actually helped increase the box office revenue at movie theaters. People just got more interested in movies, and thus more prone to pay to see a new release in the theater.
After I finished that explanation, my friend suggested we get on with the poker game.
I said that it should be interesting to see if this does go all the way to the national convention. Of course, that could be kind of a two-edged sword for the national party. Because if Barack Obama gets the majority of delegate votes yet Hillary Clinton wins because of superdelegates, the Democrats risk alienating ....
And all of my friends told me in unison to shut the hell up and deal.
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