[Update: An interesting analysis over at the fivethirtyeight blog suggests that car dealers are, by a wide margin, more likely to be donors to Republicans than to Democrats, casting some doubt on the “Dealergate” story. The key question remains whether the Chrysler dealers who were NOT targets are more politically friendly to Obama and to Democrats in a statistically significant way.]

Although this story may turn out to be a short-lived conservative conspiracy theory, there’s enough smoke here to consider there may be a real fire…

In a story that’s making its way around the internet, there appears to be evidence that the Chrysler dealers who were targeted for closure by the company and its Obama Administration puppet-masters were in very large majority donors to the Republican Party or Republican candidates.

As reported by Gateway Pundit and others, the initial analysis of dealership closures shows that “there is an extremely high correlation between dealers closing and congressional districts BHO lost.”

And a Washington Examiner article which contains a good summary of the issue so far, and links to other sources (which in turn have valuable links in the story), says “The basic issue raised here is this: How do we account for the fact millions of dollars were contributed to GOP candidates by Chrysler who are being closed by the government, but only one has been found so far that is being closed that contributed to the Obama campaign in 2008?”

This is a fast developing story, so keep an eye on the web for updates. If deeper analysis of the closures continues to show the same trend, this is going to be a HUGE problem for the Obama Administration and for Chrysler. Indeed, even if the process is allowed to continue, if these charges appear substantial and are not absolutely disproven by the Administration and the company, I would expect consumers (especially Republican consumers) to stay away from buying Chrysler cars for some time. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see Fiat back away from the deal to buy Chrysler’s assets or at least say they’re going to wait to see the results of this ongoing mostly blogger-led investigation.

Here’s Michelle Malkin’s take on “Dealergate":
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/05/28/dealergate-and-the-msm/ which gives proper credit to the bloggers who originally brought this story forward.

Also, Malkin’s warning not to jump to conclusions or necessarily feel too sorry for all of the dealerships targeted for closure:
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/05/26/be-careful-with-chrysler-closure-hit-list-claims/ As she says, “It’s unpopular to say, but there are probably many dealerships on the list that deserve to be closed down.”