WASHINGTON -- To the John McCain camp, the Democrats who rallied to the senator's side in the Michigan Republican primary were reform-minded swing voters who have been attracted in the past to candidates like Ross Perot and Patrick J. Buchanan.
But to the George W. Bush team, the McCain Democrats -- who gave the Arizona senator his margin of victory Tuesday -- were mischief-makers, out to toy with the Republican race.
Pollsters, pundits and politicians are still chewing over the identities of the Democrats who voted for McCain and the meaning of their show of support for him.
Were they typical of moderate Democrats across the country who are attracted to the candidate and would vote for him against a Democrat in the fall?
Or were these voters just bent on roiling the Republican race, in the same spirit of the contrarians who gave the Republican primary to the elder George Bush in 1980, even after Ronald Reagan had virtually clinched the nomination?
Analysts are divided on the answers. But McCain is building a theme around the crossover support of the McCain Democrats to show that he, unlike the Texas governor, can build a broader Republican majority to reclaim the White House.
"We are putting the Reagan coalition back together," said Dan Schnur, McCain's communications director. "For the first time in 20 years, we're seeing Republicans, independents and swing Democrats coalesce around a common theme, and that's reform.
"We're confident the overwhelming majority of Democrats who voted for McCain did so because they want him to be president, not because they were looking to mess around in somebody else's primary."
Yet such a coalition, even if it exists beyond Michigan, will be of little use to McCain unless he can capture more Republican votes. In the next two weeks, he will head into such delegate-rich states as California and New York, and smaller states such as Maryland, where Democrats cannot participate in the GOP selection of delegates.
As a result, says Ed Sarpolus, a Michigan pollster, "the advantage is still Bush's for the nomination."
In his speeches since Tuesday night, McCain has made an open pitch for Republican voters, trying to persuade them that, with his proven appeal to Democrats and independents, he is the more electable Republican in a general election.
His greatest opportunities ahead are in the open primaries in which Democrats can vote, as well as in states such as Massachusetts and New York, with large populations of moderate Republicans.
