Kos Revises History

Over at the Daily Kos, himself posts Let's have some fun in Michigan, an appeal for Democrats to vote from Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Michigan on Tuesday, January 15th, hoping to keep him in the race because:

...the more Republican candidates we have fighting it out, trashing each other with negative ads and spending tons of money, the better it is for us.

Kos justifies this tactic by pointing out that Michigan Republicans pulled a similar dirty trick in 1972 to vote for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, noting that Republicans' made up a third of Wallace's vote total.

In 1972, Republican voters in Michigan decided to make a little mischief, crossing over to vote in the open Democratic primary and voting for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, seriously embarrassing the state's Democrats. In fact, a third of the voters (PDF) in the Democratic primary were Republican crossover votes.

But that isn't the whole story, and Kos purposefully leaves out the nasty truth: even without a single Republican vote, segregationist Wallace would have still won handily in 1972 Michigan, by more than 111,000 votes.

Michigan's apparently segregationist Democratic mainstream gave him at least 538,953 votes (I subtracted 1/3 of Wallace' total, as if all Republicans added to Wallace's vote total to arrive at that figure, even though 1/3 of the Republican cross-overs actually voted for McGovern. This figure is heavily biased in favor of his flawed argument, and he still loses), 111,259 more than also-ran George McGovern's 425,694 according to Kos' own source.

Kos can rightly claim that Republicans crossed over in 1972. He just can't credibly claim they affected the outcome.