WorldPress.org relays a worry from across the Atlantic:
United Kingdom – The Guardian, March 5: Barring an unforeseen disaster on either side, Clinton and Trump are now on a collision course for the presidential election on 8 November 2016. The bombastic, swaggering, sometimes vulgar billionaire has stunned the political world, plunged the Republican Party into civil war and, among the pundit class, relegated the prospect of the 240-year-old republic’s first female president to a footnote. … The outside world, overjoyed by the election of America’s first black president just eight years ago, is asking: how did it come to this? …One chilling statistic for Clinton stands out: more than 8 million voters took part in the Republican Super Tuesday contests, while the Democratic turnout was around 5.5 million. … Clinton is compared to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; Trump is compared to everyone from Benito Mussolini to Juan Perón to Silvio Berlusconi.
Harry Enten @ FiveThirtyEight addressed this worry a couple of days ago:
But Democrats shouldn’t worry. Republicans shouldn’t celebrate. As others have pointed out, voter turnout is an indication of the competitiveness of a primary contest, not of what will happen in the general election. The GOP presidential primary is more competitive than the Democratic race.
Indeed, history suggests that there is no relationship between primary turnout and the general election outcome. You can see this on the most basic level by looking at raw turnout in years in which both parties had competitive primaries. There have been six of those years in the modern era: 1976, 1980, 1988, 1992, 2000 and 2008.
PARTY WITH HIGHER PRIMARY TURNOUT WINS … YEAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICAN POPULAR VOTE ELECTORAL COLLEGE 1976 16.1m 10.4m ✓ ✓ 1980 18.7 12.7 1988 23.0 12.2 1992 20.2 12.7 ✓ ✓ 2000 14.0 17.2 ✓ 2008 37.2 20.8 ✓ ✓ Primary turnout isn’t related to the general election outcome As first written up by PolitiFact, the party that had higher turnout in the primary won the national popular vote three times and lost three times. If you look at the Electoral College, the party that had the higher turnout in the primary won four times. That can hardly be described as predictive.1
The article covers more such questions in loving detail – each indicating primary turnout is not predictive. Back to the WorldPress.org viewpoint collection, another entry makes a possibly telling point:
France – France 24, March 2: Senior Republicans are running out of options in their race to stop the Donald Trump bandwagon. Whether or not they succeed, the battle is likely to prove costly for the Grand Old Party. … Josh Kraushaar, a political editor at the National Journal… noted that while Trump’s poll ratings are on the upswing, surveys also show that a quarter of the Republican electorate “won’t vote for him under any circumstances,” while some would even cross over to the Democrats, provided they pick a moderate like Clinton. … “The emerging scenario in Washington is that the Republicans are going to take this to a contested convention,” Kraushaar said, suggesting an ugly showdown between the pro- and anti-Trump camps was a likely outcome. “If Trump doesn’t come out as the nominee his supporters are going to be furious, but if he does then you have about a quarter of Republicans who won’t vote for him,” he said, describing the conundrum as a “no-win situation.”
And this could have down-ballot consequences as well. The real question, assuming the Republicans lose the election and the Senate, is whether or not the loss will have real consequences for those who’ve fomented this revolution – or if they’ll continue to be respected members of a conservative side of the United States that’s acting as if it’s out of control – or deeply over-controlled.
1H/T Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog.
