GOP is confident voters will return

By KEN de la BASTIDE
Tribune enterprise editor

May 07, 2008 10:52 pm

— With only three contested races on the Republican primary ballot, thousands of GOP voters pulled a Democratic ballot Tuesday.
Numbers from the election show that in the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama there were less then 200 undervotes, people who requested a ballot but didn’t vote in a particular race.
But when it came to the county races on the Democratic ballot, the undervote numbers ranged from a low of 4,452 votes for Circuit Court Judge Lynn Murray to a high of 6,458 for Commissioner candidate Bill Thompson. The other three uncontested races all had numbers over 5,000.
Craig Dunn, chairman of the Howard County Republican Party, said he is not concerned about voters returning to the party.
He estimated the number of Republicans in the county requesting a Democratic ballot at 5,700.
“This was not just in our county,” he said. “I’m not the least bit concerned. I talked to other county chairman and they felt the same.”
“It won’t be tough,” former GOP chairman and Commissioner candidate Brad Bagwell said of getting voters to return to the Republican Party in the fall.
“A lot was just done to have some influence on who the Democratic presidential candidate will be,” he said. “There were only three contested races on the Republican ballot.”
Commenting on incumbent Dan Burton turning back a primary challenge in the 5th Congressional District, Dunn said Burton will continue to be a strong candidate in Howard County, garnering 74 percent of the vote.
Dunn said Luke Puckett, who won the 2nd Congressional District nomination but finished third in Howard County, will be in the “ballgame” in the fall campaign but added that Democrat incumbent Joe Donnelly will be tough to beat.
“You add the roughly one-third of the voters that crossed over and it’s hard to predict what the outcome in Howard County might have been,” Dunn said.
Ken de la Bastide can be reached at (765) 454-8580 or via e-mail at ken.delabastide@kokomotribune.com