Left-wing blogger, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, has asked his readers to help with a raid of the Michigan Primary and vote for Mitt Romney to draw out the Republican presidential race to weaken GOP chances in the general. (See postings on January 10th and 11th at www.dailykos.com).

He uses two examples in 1972 and 1988 where Michigan Republicans supposedly did the same to Democrats to weaken them in their nomination contest. Neither happened the way he said.

In 1972, George Wallace overwhelmed George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey in the Michigan Presidential Primary. This was not caused by a Republican raid into the Democrat primary. Wallace had survived an assassination attempt a few days before and and forced busing for school integration was a white-hot issue in Michigan at the time. The Wallace assassination sympathy factor also extended to Maryland which held a primary the same day. Maryland, unlike Michigan, had party registration and only Democrats could vote in it. Wallace won there, too.

In 1988, Zuniga cites an alleged Republican raid to help Jesse Jackson. This didn't happen either. The Democrats had only a little over 200,000 voters who turned out in their party-run primary (out of about 7,000,000 registered voters). Over 90,000 of these came from the two central Detroit congressional districts where Jackson won 90% of the vote. According to Michael Barone in the 1990 edition of the Almanac of American Politics , Jackson also won some outstate districts because of the skills of his Michigan organizer, Joel Ferguson because "a few busloads of church congregations can notch up many percentage points in a congressional district where turnout is 6000 to 10000." Republicans had nothing to do with it--they had their own nomination contest between Bush, Dole, etc.

Republican crossover into Democratic primaries is admittedly not unheard of. But when it happens, in all of the cases I am aware of it, the Republicans are crossing over to vote for a Democrat that they would rather see in office and not simply to elect a Republican in the fall. The case that comes to mind was in Georgia where Republicans came out to defeat Cynthia McKinney by voting for a more moderate Democrat. While, I do not advocate this either, at least it results in a representative who fits the district better.

Sometimes Democrats crossover into Republican primaries to vote a Republican they actually prefer. But often, they vote to simply weaken the Republicans in the fall election as Zuniga is trying to do here. It happened to us in Washington when I am personally aware of left-wing Democrats voting for Ellen Craswell because they thought she would be the weaker opponent in 1996.

It doesn't always work out for them, though. I am too young to remember, but I've read that Democrats meddled in 1966 California GOP primary to nominate Ronald Reagan over liberal Republican San Francisco Mayor George Christopher. They got their wish.