Rants the Analyzer

Analyzer is a very technie word, perhaps appropriate for retiring State Representative Christopher Rants of Sioux City — a Republican who ran for governor, dropping out of the race this past February.  Rants tweets and announced his candidacy about a year ago via Twitter. 

Rants wrote an editorial for the Sioux City Journal’s Sunday edition, analyzing the June 8 Primary results.  It’s very numbers oriented, focused on Chet Culver’s performance/vote tally in the Democratic Primary. 

…In the statewide Democrat primary for the U.S. Senate, 67,802 Democrats voted for either Conlin, Fiegen or Krause.

Contrast that with 55,921 Democrats who voted for Chet Culver.

That means almost 20 percent of the most hardcore Democrat voters chose not to endorse Governor Culver’s candidacy.

…There were 2,150 write-ins against Culver when he was supposed to be running unopposed. That’s a big “uh-oh.”

Here is why: Primary voters are the most loyal subset of all registered voters. They turn out. They are considered the base of the party. They are the folks who work the phones on election day, walk the parade, hand out the literature and turn out their neighbors.

When 18 percent of those folks — not given any other choice on the ballot — choose not to support the incumbent Governor, and 3 percent more take the time to cast a protest vote by writing in a name, the campaign manager says “uh-oh.”