Did Clinton Really Win Texas?

By now we've all seen Tuesday's results, but who was voting?

A Rude Reader from Texas has some very interesting insight:

I can tell you that Clinton did not *win* the popular vote in Texas. We are the state of the 19-percenters, Huckabee-lovers and Hagee. Republicans knew that McCain would win Ohio and since in Texas we have open primaries, the RNC, Texas Repubs and Rush had been telling all their zombies to vote Clinton because they think they can beat her. My own mother, who hasn't voted for a Democrat for 40 years, told me that she voted for Hillary because 'you know, I support McCain, so I voted for her like everyone else up here.' My mother wasn't our only contact to verify our suspicions. All those rural counties with few votes...Republicans to the core and they HATE Hillary with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Although I live in an Obama county near the George HW Bush Presidential Library, we must have had a huge number of crossovers ourselves because Huckabee nearly beat McCain here.

... Watch the caucus results. Those are going to be far more accurate because only the true-blue Democrats return for the meetings after the polls close. The delegate representation is determined by how many supporters for each candidate show up for the caucus. The popular vote has nothing to do with how these delegates are chosen. At the caucus we vote on delegates to the county and state conventions as well as resolutions for the party platform, so the Republicans stay away lest they be outed or contaminated with our Democratic ideals."

For a while now, Rush Limbaugh and other wingnuts have been terrified of an Obama nomination and have pulled out all the stops. They're urging their listeners to vote for Hillary in the open primaries because the GOP has a better shot running against her than Obama in November.

Taking a look at the Texas Caucus poll numbers, as "CW" suggests, shows that Obama leads Clinton 56%-44% with 40% of precincts reporting with final reports due by Saturday. Meanwhile, Obama supporters are going all out, helping his campaign raise a record $55 million in February. That doesn't sound like buyer's remorse to me.

So did Hillary Clinton really "win" Texas? If she did, it was by the thinnest of margins. Thinner than the actual 101,000 vote difference suggests. Were there at least 101,000 Republicans voting in the Democratic Texas primary? I have no doubt.