2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: 12.8%. That's the margin Hillary won CA by. Remember those suspect polls that were [View all]onenote
(42,700 posts)No one was stopping or hindering anyone from going to the polls on Tuesday. And, in fact, turnout appears to be not far off what it typically has been in California's Democratic primaries (not counting years where its lower because there is an unopposed incumbent on the ballot or a unique year such as 2008 when CA's primary was early in the campaign and like most states, turnout was at crazy high, record levels -- 74 percent in California, as compared to between 43 and 48 percent in 1992, 2000, and 2004. Yesterday's turnout appears to have been at least 42 percent, and probably will turnout to be somewhat higher when the final count is certified.
Were there voters who decided not to vote because of the news on Monday? Probably. There probably were voters who decided not to vote because of the news on Saturday and Sunday when Clinton's wins in VI and PR were accompanied by stories indicating that she was close enough to having a combined number of pledged delegate and SD commitments of 2383 that the results in NJ would put her over the top before the polls even closed in California.
As I've suggested elsewhere, if the news media had information that would have been helpful to the Sanders campaign -- such as information about Clinton SDs switching to Sanders or previously uncommitted SDs committing to Sanders, and they held that information until after the voting on Tuesday, the Sanders team would have been justifiably outraged by the unethical withholding of information.