GOP primary all about the turnout
I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending to take former Gov. Bill Weld seriously. I can summarize Weld’s candidacy — and pretty much his entire post-governor career — in four words: Forgotten but not gone. What’s interesting about Tuesday’s GOP primary isn’t the final score, which we pretty much already know, but how many people show up for the game. What will Republican turnout be?
If you’re a headline skimmer like most busy Americans, you probably think Democrats have been jamming the polling places to cast their primary election ballots. After all, they’ve had two dozen candidates (as Joe Biden would say, “not a joke!”), they’ve been campaigning for months, and thanks to Mike Bloomberg they’ve spent hundreds of millions in campaign ads.
And if that’s not enough to get Democratic voter ramped up, they’ve got the ultimate turnout machine: President. Donald. Trump.
That means Democratic turnout is blowing the doors out, right? Wrong.
Compared to 2008, Democratic turnout was down in the first three contests. Yes, more people than ever voted in the New Hampshire #FITN primary, that’s true. But there are more people in New Hampshire, and more registered Democrats (Democratic registration is ahead of Republicans for the first time in a decade.)
So while 47% of eligible voters turnout out for Hillary vs Obama, only 42% showed up this year. You know who did set a record? Donald Trump.
The Donald got nearly 130,000 votes, more than any incumbent president in the modern primary era and twice incumbent Obama’s number in 2012.
The same in Iowa, where Democratic turnout was below 2008 (despite more candidates and a larger population) while Trump broke the old “unchallenged-incumbent” record by nearly 25%.
He would have likely done the same in Nevada except Republicans there didn’t bother to have a caucus. Their argument: Why bother?
Based solely on the election results, it’s a legit question. What appears to be happening is that Trump is using the primaries to energize his voters and — just as important — building lists of potential future voters. At a January Trump rally in New Jersey for example, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said 26% of people who requested tickets were Democrats and more than 10% of attendees hadn’t voted at all in 2016.
Trump won’t be coming to Massachusetts (once again, why bother?) but in the rest of America, Trump is using “meaningless” GOP primaries today to help him beat Bernie (and yes, it’s gonna be Bernie) in November.