Why Clinton voters will come back to the fold

Don't worry about those angry Hillary supporters who say they'll vote for McCain or stay home in November. History proves they'll vote for Obama.

SALON - Walter Shapiro

As an empty threat, it ranks right up there with "Eat your spinach now or your mother and I won't pay for college" or even George W. Bush's taunting promise to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." During the post-primary news lull, ardent Hillary Clinton supporters have managed to linger in the spotlight with their over-hyped warnings that they intend to sit on their hands or even bolt to John McCain if they are not wooed and won over by Barack Obama.

Now that the Obama campaign has announced that the Democratic victor and his vanquished foe will campaign together on Friday, brace yourself for the frenzied over-analysis of every sound bite of banter, every muscle twitch of body language during the Barack-and-Hillary show. The dominant story line -- and you can almost see the newspaper headlines and the crawl running across the bottom of TV screens -- is guaranteed to be (envision the furrowed brows of the on-air pundits): Was the joint appearance enough to win over the hardcore Hillary holdouts?

The answer is an obvious "yes" unless Obama starts channeling his inner Rush Limbaugh by ranting about "feminazis." Despite the efforts of Clinton activists like clothing entrepreneur Susie Tompkins Buell to highlight feminist grievances with the nomination process, the truth is that the Clintonites really have no alternative but to toe the party line. And there is a strong presumption among political scientists -- based on a landmark study from the 1970s and buttressed by statistical analyses of polling data from other presidential elections -- that voters rarely carry resentments from the primaries into the voting booths in November.

So after a nomination fight without an overriding issue, there is absolutely no ideological reason -- beyond ruffled feelings -- for, say, college-educated feminist voters to vote Republican. As Monika McDermott, a political science professor and pollster at the University of Connecticut, puts it, "If the history of the past 20 years of voting has shown us anything, it is that women are more likely to vote Democratic and these particular [pro-Hillary] women are hardcore Democrats. They will get over how Hillary was treated very quickly when they realize that the alternative to Obama is John McCain." ..... MORE HERE ....