'Of the 307,606 registered voters, 57 percent here Republican, 28 percent are Democratic and 15 percent are independents or third-party voters.'
Wow, that's a higher number for Independent than I suspected. That is a good thing. Maybe the days of open primaries aren't as far away as we thought?
yeah right, we can only wish, I fea

My first thought was, "more votes for Hillary" in the primary. I first registered as an independant then figured out that I had zero say in the primary so I reregistered as a Republican. I still vote independantly and I'm convinced that I'm not the only one. (There's that song again)

This is a many interesting dynamics here.

The first dynamic is who will the GOP switchers vote for. I have heard that there are 2 competing Republican stratigies. The 1st is to switch Dem and vote for Barrack to ensure that Hitlary doesn't even make it to November. The other is to switch and vote for Hitlary bc they feel McCain has a better chance of beating her than he does Barrack.

And the you have Anne Coulter many GOP conservatives that view McCain as being worse than Barrack and Hitlary. In fact they arguing that we would be better off with either Hitlary or Barrack bc they would have things so screwed up in 4 years that people would come running to vote for a GOP candidate. Plus they are arguing that all of Barracks and Hitlary's social welfare programs can be undone, but you can't undue McCain giving 20 million illegal immigrants citizenship.

It will be interesting to say the least.

Not a big fan of open primaries. My reason is simply that parties should pick their own candidates. R's should have no say in the D's primary etc. I know it goes on anyway, but at least with a closed primary folks have to at least go to the trouble of re-registering to tilt the other party's nomination. I wish we had more independent and third party candidates so folks didn't pander to the big 2 and get stuck always voting for the 'lesser of two evils' which is still evil.