The Total Primary Vote Counts and the Candidate Vote Breakdowns

The Total Primary Vote Counts and the Candidate Vote Breakdowns

Since I wrote so many articles on the delegate counts in the primaries, I thought I should look at the total number of voters in the primaries. This is also desired to get a perspective on Trump’s achievement of getting the highest Republican primary voter count in history.

I had not payed much attention to the vote totals since there are many caucus states, where the number of participants may only be a tenth of the final election party vote. One expects that races with several candidates of differing views will encourage a large turnout, as opposed to a one sided race where voters think that the outcome is already determined.

According to Wikipedia, the total Republican turnout was 31,160,103 voters. Instead of giving the individual vote numbers, I will just give the percentages. Trump got 45.0%, Cruz got 25.1%, Kasich got 13.8%, Rubio got 11.3%, Carson got 2.8%, Bush got 0.9%, and others got a total of 0.8%. The startling result is that while Trump emphasizes his total vote, he actually did not achieve a majority of the total vote. This may be why every speaker in the Republican convention tore down Clinton, so that even if primary voters favored another candidate, they would have no choice but to vote for Trump. It was also emphasized that a vote for another alternative, such as a Libertarian, would be equivalent to a vote for Clinton.

Political Science lectures on elections that I have attended said that Republicans would come together after the convention. I haven’t seen voters polls on this yet, but the other candidates and some party leaders, plus candidates from swing states, don’t seem to be coming together.

The total Democratic primary vote was 30,015,289. Again, with the caucuses, this doesn’t represent all Democrats who would have liked to vote, if all states had democratic caucuses. Of the primary votes, Clinton got 55.2%, and Sanders got 43.1%.

An amazing coincidence is that the Republican and Democratic primary voter turnouts were almost equal, with the Republican total being only 3.8% larger.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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