Eric the Blue

I’m not the only one who must have noticed the wide partisan disparity in the number of voters in yesterday’s DFL and Republican primary elections in Minnesota. In the contests for US Senate, for example, there were about 697,000 ballots cast in the Democratic primary, and only about 406,500 in the Republican primary. The winning Democrat, Peggy Flanagan, did not quite reach 60% of the total Democratic vote, but she still got more votes than all the Republicans combined. Percentage-wise, the breakdown was 63(D) to 37(R) in the Senate race, and it was essentially the same in the gubernatorial one, where, on the Democratic side, there was barely a contest.

My question is whether this is in any way typical and what it might portend for the general election.

It’s hard to answer the question about whether the disparity qualifies as “typical” because circumstances can be so different. To take perhaps the most obvious case, it’s common for there to be an incumbent who is more or less unchallenged during the primary season and, on the other side, a spirited contest that generates a lot of interest. It seems foolish, in this scenario, to make very much of a turnout disparity in the primary. But this year in Minnesota we have a gubernatorial race and a Senate race, both without an incumbent.

Searching the recent past for circumstances that align with those that prevail this election season, I see that, in 2018, the DFL governor, Mark Dayton, was not seeking another term, which resulted in a 3-way primary fight between Tim Walz, Erin Murphy, and Lori Swanson. Meanwhile, there was another competitive primary among the Republicans: Jeff Johnson versus Tim Pawlenty. In the Democratic primary, won by Walz, 583,735 votes were cast. On the Republican side, Johnson won a primary in which 320,914 Minnesotans voted. Crunching those numbers, it works out that 64.5 percent of the primary election voters were Democrats, and 35.5 percent were Republicans–similar, though slightly more tilted toward the Democrats, than this year’s 63-37 split.

Walz won the general election by 54 to 42.5 percent.

I’m not saying something like that is going to happen again, in both the Senate and gubernatorial races, but I hope it does, and it would be a prediction based on something other than wishful thinking and vibes generated by hanging out mainly with people who think as you do. We Democrats tend to be bed-wetters, and yes, the Republicans have an issue with fraud. You want to know what Minnesotans hate besides fraud? Trump. Operation Metro Surge. The war in Iran. The cost of gas, ground beef, health insurance, and day care.

At least the end of the primary season might provide a brief respite from political advertising. My minority view is that the ads don’t have to be terrible (though in fact almost all of them are). If you hate the one I’m pasting in below, on behalf of Abdul El-Sayd, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, then you have my permission to give up looking for a good one:

It is, in addition to being adorable, a spoof on the truly terrible ads attacking him that are no doubt in production.