May 27 2016

A Distant Thunder In The Electorate



Back in 2014 I could feel the mood of the country and how it was poised to reject the Democrats and sweep them out of office. I saw evidence of the tsunami coming in voting trends in the primaries and early voting totals (see here for my analysis). It proved to be a historic election night as the wave of anti-elite sentiment washed out almost every marginal Democrat Senate candidate (see here for my live blogging).

I feel a similar disturbance in The Force this year (or “The Electorate” if you will) . With Donald Trump blasting through an army of establishment candidates, it is clear this year is not the year of any candidate who comes from the Political Industrial Complex.

And again, we see this in the voting trends:

The Republican Party has set a party record this year in pre-convention state election turnout with over 28 million votes to date which is 136% of the record high voter turnout in 2008. That’s four million more votes than the Democratic primary race this year.

There are five states left to vote including California.

Emphasis mine. It is hard to understand where the Democrats are because there is not a lot of current data.  In 2012 Obama ran unopposed and garnered 6.160 million votes out of ~ 7 million cast.

That is nowhere near the 24 million cast so far this year for Democrats.

In 2008 Hillary and Obama combined for about 35 million – which was a huge year for the Democrats.

In 2012 the GOP combined for ~21.4 million, which was the prior record turnout for the GOP. In 2008 the combined GOP number was 20.1 million.

So the GOP looks to have the energy and momentum on their side in 2016 and could reach 30 million votes when all is said and done.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are not going to come close to their 2008 high water mark. They will be heading into their convention deeply divided, with an unexciting candidate who has lots and lots of baggage.



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