In science, a phenomenon is "over-determined" when it seems to have more than one sufficient cause. Something of this sort seems to be going on with John McCain's victory in the Florida primary. Thomas Edsall explains this phenomenon by pointing to "anti-Bush moderates."
As John McCain took a big step toward winning the nomination in Florida, the Republican Party looks increasingly likely to pass the torch to a candidate powered by decidedly un-Republican constituencies: anti-Bush voters, the non-religious, supporters of abortion rights, and social-cultural moderates.
Well, that would explain the delight of the New York Times and Washington Post over McCain's victory, and it does rest on considerable evidence from the exit polls. But it is curious that so many "un-Republican constituencies" voted, and constituted a plurality, in a closed Republican primary.
Marc Caputo, writing in the Miami Herald, has discovered the true cause of McCain's victory: Hispanic voters.
South Florida was supposed to be the sixth borough, New York south for the former Big Apple mayor. But McCain shattered that, winning Miami-Dade with a 37-32 percent margin, boosted by the support of Cuban-Americans and the surprise endorsement of Charlie Crist, the popular governor of Florida.
Of course, Hispanic voters in the U.S. are not, for the most part, Cuban-American voters. But if McCain really has the power to attract Hispanic Americans, it may serve him well in the event that his Democratic opponent is Barack Obama.
But no, it wasn't Hispanics or un-Republican Republicans, it was conservatives, according to Peter Schweizer at National Review Online.
The final factor, which has been overlooked so far in the news coverage, is that McCain campaigned much more as a conservative down here than he did in Iowa, New Hampshire, or even South Carolina. He emphasized the war on terror, of course, but also his fiscal conservative record... It seemed like a throw-back to the McCain of more than ten years ago, before McCain-Feingold, global warming, opposition to the Bush tax cuts, criticism of religious conservatives — you know the litany. I was surprised when I looked up McCain’s lifetime American Conservative Union rating and discovered it was an 83, just slightly lower than Newt’s. So it’s hard to say whether conservatives have moved toward McCain, or McCain has moved toward conservatives. But one thing is certain, he needed conservatives to win in Florida.
McCain may have "lost" the conservative vote to Romney, but he got enough of it to pad his margin of victory.
Allow me to suggest that the true cause of McCain's victory in the Florida Republican primary was Florida Republicans. With a ridiculously diverse nation, each party, nationally and state by state, is a complex pallet of demographic colors. The various candidates each tried to paint a convincing picture of what the nation should be. McCain painted the winning entry. Romney painted himself into a corner. McCain has a lot of canvas to cover between now and September. He will need a lot of red state paint.
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