Prior to this week, the most telling statistic in the presidential campaign was the voter turnout in the Democratic primary.

County by county and state by state, Democratic turnout consistently dwarfed Republican turnout. Minnesota was particularly revealing: in the very state where the Republicans are set to hold their convention, 214,066 votes were cast in the Dem primary, compared to 62,828 votes for the GOP candidates.

The question was whether the Democratic party could sustain that level of turnout in the general election.

The last two weeks have gone a long way toward answering that. Two stats in particular are all anyone needs to know.

First, according to Nielsen Obama’s speech on Thursday drew slightly more than 40 million viewers. To put that in perspective, not only is that the same draw as the Opening Ceremony of the Atlanta Olympics, but it pretty safely places Obama beyond celebrity. Even A-list celebrities cannot hit 40 million for a televised event. 40 million pretty clearly puts Obama in the category of icon—a personality that doesn’t just tap into the zeitgeist of an age, as all celebrities do, but comes to appear inseparable from it.

Second, 2.9 million. That’s how many text messages the Obama camp sent to announce Biden’s vice presidency.

Think about that number for a minute: most Americans, certainly young ones, do not give their cell phone numbers to anyone other than personal acquaintances. Yet 2.9 million people willingly gave theirs to a politician. Read studies like this, and it goes a long way toward suggesting that voter turnout in the general will remain just as high as in the primaries.

For the Republicans, the two numbers spell trouble. Palin may be photogenic, but Obama is an icon.