Barry Burden notes that party identification explains too much variance in vote choice these days:

The old Michigan triad of partisanship, issues, and candidate evaluations as an explanation for vote choices is proving less useful in recent days. The main reason is that party identification and the vote are practically one and the same. In the 2000 and 2004 NES data, better than 90% of partisans voted for the presidential candidate of their party. In 2004 only 40 respondents (7% of partisans) voted against their stated party identification.

He sets out a few intriguing directions for future research on party identification.

That’s where I’ll be tonight, along with all the other cool kids in the Mid-Southern blogosphere.

Scipio writes:

This is roughly… equivalent… to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we’re not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we’re going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn’t work out, we’ll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

Funnily enough, I think this actually has happened to me on both the job and romantic markets.