Some thoughts on turnout. Def think impeachment & Super Bowl-as @NateSilver538 opined-mattered, but mb more imp was the sense of too many choices & the prospect of having to endure a public process where your preference isn’t viable & then you must realign. That’s a weird dynamic
And you have to assume there are some people that find the prospect of publicly dickering over their vote choices terrifying. This might have been compounded about worries among voters that there’d be divisiveness between supporters of diff candidates. We do know that when people
Are given too many choices some shut down. There may have also been a sense from voters of not wanting responsibility of choosing. One common theme in the polling has been that voters really want to beat trump but have no idea what kind of candidate best does it. Sitting out is
A way to avoid responsibility for reaching such a big decision. But yeah, ultimately, I think it was the amorphous competition of this cycle compared to the 2 person competitions in ‘08 & ‘16. People should keep in mind a couple of things. The reason everyone predicted such high
Turnout is that every major election since trump has produced at least a 10pt turnout bump. However, those were all generals- this was our first primary & it’s not even a “real” primary. I will say that almost none of the Dem primaries since Trump have produced large turnout
Increases (VA Gov 2017 did though) and yet the generals went on to produce big turnout bumps. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the regular primary states. One other point though is that the reason that Sanders is either going to lose to Buttigieg or come close to doing
so is bc there was no youth turnout surge in IA. Or at least not a very big one. Oh yeah, should probably mention that along with all the major rules changes, party officials tell me today that many many precincts were moved to accommodate the anticipated turnout increases so
It’s also possible that contributed to lower than expected turnout.
