538: Primary Turnout Means Nothing For The General Election

[RandySF]

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......

In five of the six years in our data set, the party that had a smaller vote share margin between its nominee and runner-up — that is, the one with the more competitive contest — had higher turnout. Indeed, the difference in margin for the two winners and the difference in raw turnout for each party had a fairly high correlation of -0.81. The only year in which turnout was higher in the less competitive primary was in 1976, when Jimmy Carter won just 40 percent of the primary vote and had serious competitors until the end of the primary calendar. Both sides were quite competitive that year.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Republican turnout is higher than Democratic turnout this year. Hillary Clinton is a commanding front-runner on the Democratic side, while the front-runner on the Republican side has earned only one-third of the vote and less than half the delegates allocated so far. Voters are turning out for the more competitive contest.


http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/primary-turnout-means-nothing-for-the-general-election/

[leveymg]

1. This seems to contradict the headline.

538 lost its credibility in MI.