Dems continue to turn out in record numbers

February 10, 2008

I admit it; I’m a sucker for stories about record-breaking turnouts in Democratic primaries and caucuses. It’s been going on for a month, and it continued in full force yesterday. Dan Savage, in Seattle, compared the scene to images from a horror movie.

The gym at Stevens Elementary right now resembles the Brooklyn Bridge scene in Cloverfield — only without the promise of giant, derivative monster showing up to put Capitol Hill caucus-goers out of our misery. And instead of bloodied hipsters asking each other “What the hell is that?” over and over again, it’s roughly 1500 people wearing tasteful scarves asking each other, “Where the hell is the line for my precinct table?”

Now, Savage’s larger point was that this kind of pandemonium wouldn’t be entirely necessary if Washington would just break down and host a primary instead of a caucus, but the point about turnout is nevertheless is important — Dems participated in droves. In 2004, 100,000 showed up for the state’s Democratic caucuses, which at the time broke a Washington record. Yesterday, that number was nearly doubled.

I also enjoyed this take from Nebraska.

In Nebraska, The Omaha World-Herald reported that organizers at two caucus sites had been so overrun by crowds that they abandoned traditional caucusing and asked voters to drop makeshift scrap-paper ballots into a box instead. In Sarpy County, in suburban Omaha, traffic backed up on Highway 370 when thousands of voters showed up at a precinct where organizers had planned for hundreds.

All of this, of course, keeps with the recent trend.

The LAT noted today:

Not only have more people registered, but more voters are turning out at the polls. About half the states that held elections through Super Tuesday saw record turnout, according to an analysis by the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University in Washington, which was reported by the Associated Press.

Twelve states saw record voter turnout in their Democratic primaries and 11 states broke records in their Republican contests, said the report, which was issued before Saturday’s balloting.

Missouri, which George W. Bush won in 2000 and ’04 and which analysts point to as a bellwether state, illustrates the new political landscape in dramatic fashion.

In the 2000 Super Tuesday primary, 740,852 voters cast ballots in the Republican and Democratic races, 64% of them for Republicans.

Last week, even though the candidates did little campaigning in Missouri, about 1.4 million voters flooded to the polls, with 58% of the votes cast for Democrats.

“I would much rather be in the situation of the Democrats than the Republicans,” said Michael McDonald, an election-turnout expert at George Mason University and the Brookings Institution.

No matter which Dem you love or loathe, it’s easy to take some comfort in knowing that rank-and-file Democrats, in practically every state, are excited about this election.

“In the 2000 Super Tuesday primary, 740,852 voters cast ballots in the Republican and Democratic races, 64% of them for Republicans.

Last week, even though the candidates did little campaigning in Missouri, about 1.4 million voters flooded to the polls, with 58% of the votes cast for Democrats.”

Okay, I’m a little math deficient – a whole lot, actually – but does the above math ALSO show a big increase in Republican turnout as well for this year?????

Thanks.

  • Okay, I’m a little math deficient – a whole lot, actually – but does the above math ALSO show a big increase in Republican turnout as well for this year?????

    If I’m doing the math right, there is about a 25% increase in Repubs to about 125% increase in Dems. Check my math.

  • What’s really promising about these huge turnouts is the large number of Dems who will be satisfied to have either Obama or Clinton on November’s ballot. These aren’t people driven to block any single politician from prevailing. It’s people chomping at the bit to toss the Bush era and it’s republican enablers into the proverbial dumpster.

  • It is wonderful news indeed. My current political reading has been depressing, in that there is a logical train of thought that ends with our votes not really counting for all that much in the end. And our average turnout, compared with other developed, democratic nations is pitiful. Europeans can regularly point to voter turnout in the high 80% range…of course, they mostly use some form of proportional representation systems so every vote in every contest really does count.

    Anyway, the only way to make our system work at maximum efficiency (which would still be less democratically efficient than proportional representation…which hadn’t been thought of when the Constitution was written) is to turn out the vote.

    Let’s hope that whatever happens, come November Americans will turn out in droves. Only that will upset the current political calculus keeps us stuck in our current rut.

    BTW, my lady friend has been working on the Obama campaign, and talked to a fair number of people yesterday who had already caucused in Nebraska. She reported that there was serious excitement…not just for the candidates, but of the process and the participation in said process.

  • It is time for dems to sing praises for Howard Dean and his 50 state strategy for the DNC. Not only
    has it helped lift Barack, but will ease the fears about the super delegates, (who want to win in Nov.),
    and provide not just hope but confidence that Barack’s win will be assured well before August.

  • I hope this turnout is more about the eagerness to move past Bush than the fierce contention between our frontrunners. We need everyone who’s turning out now, to do so again in November. Whether Barack or Hillary wins, that will require some deft healing.

  • For all you statistics geeks, here’s an interesting site showing how many people voted in each of the primaries and caucuses, and comparing them to how many are age-eligible or voting-eligible. (Voting-eligible) does not mean registered, but rather eliminates non-citizens and in some states felons or former felons.

    http://elections.gmu.edu/Voter_Turnout_2008_Primaries.htm

    Unfortunately, it does take them a few days to update numbers. In primary states, you can also click to find out the actual votes for each candidate in each state.

  • This is what I have been following (and repeatedly asking for) since the primaries started.

    At this point, we could nominate a friggin’ hamster and I would vote for it before I would vote for any gooper! A hamster would by far and away do better than Bush or any of the running goops.

    And most of the dems would cross over and vote for either nominee. I honestly think the its trolls who are the ones interjecting MOST (granted not all) of the crap we get so tired of.

    Ok, this is OT and I apologize in advance. Since there isn’t an open thread yet today (sorry, I am working in Europe this week so I am six hours ahead of EST), I was wondering if anyone else saw these two items. I am sincerely interested in your thoughts.

    http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/07/6918/

    http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/ConnectingTheDots.htm

    Interesting, both. Please do share your thoughts.

    Thanks!

    p.s. I don’t respond to trolls so I don’t give two craps about your thoughts. Just sayin’.

  • It was almost inevitable. When was the last time we had serious primary contests?

    Democrats had a race going in 2004, but John Kerry emerged as the frontrunner too quickly to sustain interest into February.

    2000 had two presumptive nominees. 1996 had a contest among Republicans, but even then it was a question of who wanted to be defeated by Bill Clinton, and everyone deferred to Dole’s seniority.

    1992 and 1988 had wide-open Democratic primaries, but it was another case of knowing in advance who they’d be challenging. You have to go back a long ways to find a situation like 2008 where both parties had no presumptive front-runner (up until McCain all but sealed the nomination, which Huckabee voters don’t want to acknowledge).

  • I was in a similarly packed gymnasium in Seattle yesterday, and I have a different take on it than Dan Savage.

    Democracy is messy, and involves rubbing elbows (literally yesterday) with your fellow citizens. What I saw was volunteers doing their best to cope with a record turn-out, neighbors taking an opportunity to meet and greet and talk about why they were all there, and people stepping up to help make it all go well. You got what you put in to it. At the end, we had to select a number of us to go represent us at the next level of the process, the legislative district caucuses. People who were there, standing next to us, regular folks, our neighbors, who we’d be chatting with, volunteered and got elected. Grassroots, people. Building community and common purpose. Too bad Dan seems to think it’s a waste of time.

    By the next presidential cycle, King County, WA will have converted to all mail-in ballots. We won’t even have the experience of seeing our neighbors at a polling place, much less the joyful crush of a record-breaking caucus turnout. That’s way too anonymous and disconnected for my taste. I hope the WA Democratic party keeps its caucus system.

  • MsJoanne,

    I had seen the article(s) about infraguard. And i don’t like it, not one little bit. I had not seen such an in-depth look at the cable cutting, so thank you for that.

    I suggest that we all read those two articles. As exciting as this nomination cycle is, we have to keep in mind that we are a long way from being out of the woods with the Bush administration. Perhaps we need to take some of this energy and apply it to the situation we are currently in. Maybe we have a politician or two who’s willing to have our back, finally.

    And we should all keep in mind that if the Iranian Oil bourse not only opens, but is successful, we could quickly find ourselves buying loaves of bread with wheelbarrows full of dollars. The “Axis of Evil” had/has nothing to do with terror and everything to do with countries attempting (or having done in the case of the DPRK and Iraq) to leave the petro-dollar system.

    We have been the richest nation in the world these last 50 years of so not because of our inherent greatness but because we’re the only country in the world that can get richer by simply printing money. The bourse could be the geo-political equivalent of Dorothy pulling back the curtian to expose the Wizard as nothing more than a trembling old man. And i worry greatly about what lengths we will go to in order to keep the curtian closed…

  • MsJoanne: I had never heard about the cable cuts before. But a google search does show intermittent articles about them from main stream media, although without any suggested causes. Are you suspecting that the two stories are connected? I find the InfraGuard story to be a bit implausible.

  • Danp, google InfraGuard. Our own brown shirts in the making?

    Sounds like a classic case of fascism to me (the ultimate corporate state).

  • In the past two weeks there have nine inexplicable ocean cable cuts in areas that are close to Muslim countries. This has left many areas of the Middle East with hampered internet and communications service. Ostensively, this has delayed the opening of the Iranian oil bourse. The American braindead corporate media hasn’t reported much on either of these developments, which has caused some among us to speculate, perhaps prematurely, about cause and effect.

    InfraGuard is indeed scary. You can’t become a member unless nominated by an existing member and then being vetted by the FBI. This could easily be the beginning of a secret political movement/party. Will the membership cards be numbered? Will a low number entitle one to great respect and power later on? The Nazis did it that way. The real question is will a new administration put a stop to it? Or has this virus been seeded and can now never be fully expunged, just like a herpes infection. It just goes underground, into dormancy, but emerges when conditions are right.

    The only way this country can survive is for impeachment against Bush/Cheney to proceed immediately. Otherwise no government will ever be accountable again.

  • I’ve never been to a Washington State caucus before yesterday (I’ve lived in Bellingham since 1970). They were always too late to matter for the presidential nominations. They were mostly attended by a small number of party hacks interested in going on to later/higher level party conventions. This year was definitely different.

    Washington was still “in play” and we two terrific candidates. (Unlike here at TCR we all loved both candidates and held them unquestionably superior to anything the GOP could ever dredge up.) As seems to have true throughout the state, the meeting place (basement of a Presbyterian church) was never meant to hold as many people as showed up.

    It was good to see so many of our neighbors, if only for an hour or so. My wife and I host a large block party every summer (several blocks actually), so this was a winter form of that minus the beer, wine, hamgurbers, veggie burgers, hotdogs, kids, dogs, etc. There was a lot of good-natured kidding (“let’s declare war on precinct 230” – meeting on the other part of the floor, behind an accordion-style room-divider).

    When we finally got down to the business at hand we found we were as disorganized as any pack of Democrats can be, but we did get the job done. I felt a little awkward when I saw the very tiny (but brave) group huddled for Hillary. I almost wanted to cross over to lend them moral support. But I was also impressed by the huge number of us backing Obama. Apparently it went the same way across the state, even east of the Cascades, normally a hotbed of right-wing fanaticism.

    As a result of my experience I’ve reached the conclusion that we should have a National Caucus Day. An official federal holiday for the purposes of selecting delegates to nominating conventions. There isn’t space here to describe how basic the feeling of democracy is in these caucuses. It’s very human in scale. There’s nothing like it in modern life or on TeeVee. No polling. No candidates. Non-professional speakers. No money. It’s indescribably precious. You have to experience it.

  • Ed/biggerbox/(and from earlier threads)DiAnne/episty:
    I am so glad I decided to follow up on my curiosity about caucuses and attend my Washington (36th) district caucus yesterday. You all have done a great job describing the type of experience I had. My arrival at the caucus put in me in mind of a movie scene. People (often families with small children) all converging on the site with so much anticipation. Once I found my precinct (not easy) everyone was welcoming and neighborly because that is what we all were – neighbors. Obama’s dominance in my precinct was evident from the sign in -before any discussion / persuasion took place. And the supporters of Hillary were not prepared to make her case. All nice people but they paled in comparison to the Obama supporters who clearly were energized.
    But, most of all the room (which was crammed full of people) was looking forward to “taking our country back;” this was the primary undercurrent of the day. I left feeling uplifted and it had nothing to do with who “won” in our precinct and everything to do with the coming together of my neighbors to affect change. If this is the last caucus for Washington Dems, I am doubly glad I experienced it.
    Finally, some have posited that the delegates who volunteered to go to the next level will not follow through on their commitments. I would be shocked if this were true for the delegates for either side from my precinct. I believe in my neighbors, and my hat is off to them for stepping up.

  • I worked with the Obama campaign at their MN HQ in Minneapolis/St. Paul for the run up to and on Super Tuesday. We were expecting – and got – massive turnout at all the caucus locations in the city. The campaign had the precinct captains take stacks of blank paper “ballots” and extra registration sheets with us because in other states precincts had run out of those things – and sure enough, many precincts, including the one I worked, ended up putting some of that extra paper to good use (excellent preparation on the part of the campaign – the HQ was chaotic, sure, but they have a really great system for GOTV. If organization can win this thing, Obama has NOTHING to worry about).

    Here’s what impressed me the most about the caucus, though….

    In MN the presidential preference vote isnt REALLY part of the caucus per se. After you register, you vote for your prefered candidate on a private paper ballot, and then you are free to leave … or you can stay for the actual caucus, which handles state and local party affairs, designates delegates, etc.

    I was sent, along with two other out-of-state volunteers, to a precinct that was caucusing on the U of Minnesota campus. We had a line around the auditorium and out the door before the registration even began – turnout was nearly triple what it had been the previous year. At least two-thirds of the voters were students at the university. I assumed they were all there for the presidential preference and would leave immediately afterward.

    Surprisingly, though, quite a few stuck around. The caucus itself – which I have to admit, was kinda dull – ended up full of students… probably half the crowd was under 30. And these young people weren’t all just passively watching and raising their hands to vote, either. Several of them got up to speak (and some in groups) about issues they thought the local Democratic party should consider. Some had full out presentations planned. And all the delegates we designated ended up being students. The caucus manager was overwhelmed – he said he’d never seen such a young crowd, and hed been doing this for years. The (mostly elderly) caucus regulars looked just plain baffled. And I was just tickled. I knew that this election (and Obamas candidacy in particular) had sparked a lot of interest in presidential politics in young people. But I was impressed to see that, at least with some, that interest is being carried over to the process as a whole.

    We have a real chance to grow our party for a generation here, people. Lets not waste it!

  • I agree that it’s the stories about record Dem turnouts that I focus on. I am a Hillary supporter, (and was an Edwards supporter before that), but I have to say that DAMN, we have a FINE choice of candidates! Any Rethuglican who’s chortling over the “in-fighting” amongst the Democrats (the way my colleague at work was on Friday) is gonna be in for a BIG surprise.

  • One of the many benefits of the WA sate caucus was the number of voters we got to register or update their registration on site. Also, it allowed voters to connect with their candidate’s campaign volunteers.

    I thought the turnout in ’04 was impressive…’08 was overwhelming.

    • Comments are closed.