REPUBLICANS FOR EDWARDS!

I was about to post on this Saletan column about how Edwards' crossover votes from Republicans in open primaries means that he has a better chance of beating Bush than Kerry does, but not only did Hesiod beat me to it, but he makes a lot of good points, ones that I intended to make.

The only problem with this is that, in every single national poll, John Kerry ALWAYS does better than Edwards in a head to head matchup with Bush.

How can that be? How can Edwards pull in so many Republican and independents in Wisconsin, for example, yet not be as close as Kerry is to Bush in national polls?

Simple. Many Republicans (and some independents) are voting for Edwards to hurt Kerry, drag out the Democratic nominating process, and help Bush in the fall. It's not too hard to figure this out. And, Wisconsin's very liberal voter registration law, which allows you to register to vote AT YOUR POLLING PLACE ON THE DAY OF THE ELECTION, made that state's primary particularly susceptible to these shenanigans.

There is a recent precedent, incidentally, which supports this theory: The 2000 GOP Primary in Michigan.

I know for a FACT that many, many Democrats turned out in droves to vote for John McCain as a way to screw then Governor John Engler and to throw a monkey wrench into the GOP nominating process. It was also a way to poison the well between Bush and McCain further and dissuade McCain from accepting a slot as Bush's Vice President.

In fact, both my wife and I voted for McCain knowing that we'd both be voting for Al Gore (and did so) in November of 2000.

Now, what about the other states Saleton cites? Of them, only Missouri, and New Hampshire will be "swing" states in November. In those two states, Kerry killed Edwards among independents and did well enough among Republicans.

There's a bit more there too.

UPDATE: Wearing his Tapped hat, Yglesias has more thoughts on the subject.

Edwards, after all, hasn't yet had to face the sort of onslaught from the right that's been directed at Kerry over the past few weeks, so it stands to reason that folks disillusioned by Bush but not temperamentally disinclined toward the Democrats would feel warm and fuzzy about him at this point. Would that hold up in an actual campaign? Maybe -- his stump skills are impressive, his regional background is ideal, and unlike Kerry he doesn't have a long voting record that can be thrown back at him. On the other hand, the flipside of this point is that he doesn't have much in the way of experience -- especially national security experience.

Unfortunately, though, the constant factor isn't Kerry's vulnerability to attack, it's the Bush campaign's constant propensity to attack any Democrat who gets the nomination.