Hey, Wait A Minute
The big story on the Democratic side in Iowa was the “massive” turn out, apparently fueled by young people voting for Obama, right? Wrong – there was no massive turn out, there was simply a much better turn out than the pathetic showing in 2004.
There are more that 2 million registered voters in Iowa. The “massive turn out” was a total of less than 360,000 voters for both parties. That is less than 18%. It’s a lot better than the single digit turn out in 2004, but it is not something to be proud of, nor to trumpet. In the meaningless Presidential primary in Florida in 2004 the turn out was better than 20%.
The parties need to look at this mess. Iowa wants to be first, but they don’t bother to show up. Given the brutal conditions in the state at this time of year, Iowa would be better off with a date in the late Spring and give the number one slot to Hawaii. Another possibility is no primaries or caucuses of any kind until after the vernal equinox.
8 comments
That assumes that politicians can spell “vernal equinox” :-).
OK, Spring, then. It just that my local supervisor of elections has a hissy fit over any election with less than 50% participation, and everyone is going nuts over how great 18% is.
Well if you aggregate both parties to get those numbers I guess it may be hard to say what it means, if Republican numbers are substantially down and Democratic numbers are substantially up, for instance, the overall change may seem a lot more modest.
usually i’m all for full participation in the democratic process, everybody should have a say, everybody should do their civic duty, blahblahblah, but this time around i wouldn’t be unhappy if republicans stayed home in droves.
Michael, the Dems doubled, and the Reps weren’t far behind in increases. I would also note that Obama got the bulk of the independents and Rep crossover voters. I think Huckabee and Paul pulled in the extra Rep voters.
In Iowa, Hipparchia, a lot of them voted for Obama in the caucuses, which is troubling.
If many of the Republicans who turned up voted for Obama…what does that mean? Do we still total them in the Republican turnout category?
i think they count the number of people who caucus for [with?] the democrats and report that as the democratic turnout, and count the number of people who caucus for/with the republicans and report that number.
3% of the democratic caucus-goers were registered republicans; 1% of the republican caucus-goers were registered democrats.
Hipparchia’s correct, Michael, no matter what your actual voter’s registration card says you are counted by the party you caucus with for the totals.
It’s certainly a good thing that those of us who live in places where you actually are required to be a member of a particular party to vote in that party’s primaries are allowed into the process until it is too late to make a difference, otherwise the media might have to alter its narrative an cover the actual race.