Is Dean's campaign dead? Maybe. Maybe not. DR doesn't pretend to know the answer to that question.

But DR feels a little surer about something that should be dead: the Dean campaign's theory that an influx of new voters can make up for deficits among the swing voters who typically show in national elections. Dean has said: "We can't beat George Bush with the same people who voted in 2000. The only way we can beat George Bush is by attracting people who have given up on politics." (See articles last week by John Harris in The Washington Post and by John Harwood in The Wall Street Journal for details on the Dean campaign's orientation toward new voters.)

Dean's campaign is obviously rethinking its approach to a lot of things. Time to rethink their approach to this one as well. Most obviously, an influx of new voters didn't help Dean much at all in the Iowa caucuses. In fact, those new voters surged in the direction of the caucus winners, Kerry and Edwards. Is there any reason to think this result will be different in the general election? Nope, that's what usually happens with new voters: they go for the winner and therefore amplify, not change, the result we would have seen without the new voters.

But Dean's campaign apparently believes they can make up, say, a 52 percent to 48 percent split against the Democrats among the previously-existing electorate (pegging it at 2000's 105 million voters) by attracting 8 million new voters into the process.

This is nuts. Even assuming they can increase turnout that much, they'd have to get a 3:1 split among these new voters (that is, win these 8 million new voters by 6 million to 2 million) to dig themselves out the hole they'd dug themselves among the rest of the electorate.

It ain't gonna work. Time to bury this particular idea and bury it deep.