Presidential primary history

The above article is just a little history lesson about the GOP and the Democrat's choosing of their presidential candidates. The gist of it is that Rudy Guiliani, being the front-runner for the GOP right now, has a good shot at being the nominee since Republican's tend to go with their front-runners. Hillary Clinton, however, could be vulnerable because the Democrats are not as decisive early on and front-runners tend to falter (i.e. Howard Dean in 2004).

My initial thoughts are that the Republican party is largely homogeneous: predoninantly white, middle to uppper-class, and Protestant. A GOP candidate can play to that base early on and cruise to victory. The Democrats, on the other hand, have a largely fractured base. A candidate must try to balance the competing pieces, such as the anti-war people, the gay community, the labor forces or the African-American community to name a few, and often times stumble along the way.

In 2000 George Bush was able to satisfy the Republican base early on with his "compassionate conservative" message, and never let go. In 2004, however, Howard Dean may have played too much to one part of the Democratic base, the anti-war part, leaving primary voters to go with the presumably safer choice of John Kerry.

There are a lot of factors, but that's just what I thought of when I saw this. I've always said that the GOP has been better at party discipline the last decade or so primarily because their party has less diversity of opinions in the base, allowing them to easily rally beind a single message. Thoughts?