Why the Turnout in November Should Help Hillary Clinton

Should Democrats be worried that their voters are less energized than the G.O.P.’s are this primary season? In a piece earlier this month headlined “Beneath Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday Wins, Signs of Turnout Trouble,” the New York Times noted that many fewer Democrats had participated in primaries this year than in 2008, especially throughout the South. The conservative Washington Times, meanwhile, has been sounding this theme since the start of primary season, with headlines like “Donald Trump Drives GOP’s Record Turnout; Democrats Lack Enthusiasm.” And, according to the Pew Research Center, while seventeen per cent of eligible Republican voters came out to the polls in the first twelve primaries, just under twelve per cent of Democrats did. (You can pause for a moment to take in how low both of those percentages are.) Moreover, Trump’s chest-thumping nativism has brought to the polls people who don’t usually bother with them, notably white men with a high-school degree or less, the “poorly educated,” whom Trump professes to love. Their presence has certainly made itself felt in the Republican primaries. And on the other side are the Bernie Sanders diehards—not large in number, surely, but there—who might actually stay home in November rather than cast a vote for Clinton.

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