Republicans Helped Hillary Win Texas

Republican crossover voters apparently helped win the Democratic primary in Texas for Hillary Clinton — with one in every 10 Democratic votes came from Republicans.

And they could have been heeding the call of top-rated radio host Rush Limbaugh, who had been urging Republican listeners to vote for Hillary to prevent the Democrats from unifying around Obama and to keep the two candidates battling each other.

“Hillary Clinton is back in the race, thanks in some small part to Republican voters mindlessly following the commands of radio entertainers and crossing party lines to vote for the candidate they view as weakest,” Bud Kennedy writes in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Wednesday.

According to exit polls, of the 10 percent of Democratic votes that came from Republicans, about 53 percent of the crossovers chose Obama and 46 percent went with Clinton, the Dallas Morning News reports.

But previously these crossovers had voted overwhelmingly in favor of Obama. And the exit polls also show that Hillary won handily among conservative voters, including many Democrats, 53 percent to 43 percent over Obama, reports the Web site Outside the Beltway — which also noted that “Clinton truly might have won the Texas primary on the backs of Rush Limbaugh listeners.”

Clinton’s overall margin of victory was just 3 percent — about 98,000 votes out of 2.8 million cast.

“Thousands of traditionally Republican voters helped swell the ranks of the Democrats,” the Morning News observed.

“Some crossed over out of support for Mr. Obama, others were simply dissatisfied with their own party’s choice. Still others supported Mrs. Clinton hoping that by helping extend the Democratic feud, they would leave their own party in a better spot this fall.”

Limbaugh claimed at least some of the credit for Hillary’s victory, saying on Wednesday: “What we did, if we did anything, is to create a bunch of chaos in the Democratic Party — and it worked.”