Tobin’s Look at Primary Power Shifting to The NCC Burbs
This is in effect “part 2” of Tobin’s last post which observed that Wilmington may have a diminished impact on state wide Democratic primaries this year owing to the fact that the city is not hosting State Rep and State Senate primaries featuring seasoned campaigners with experienced ground games.
So…who is going to provide more primary voters this year?
Spoiler Alert:
“(the 24th & the 27th state rep districts) and two in the C&D Canal area (state rep districts 8 & 9)”
So I’m in a king making district this year…why am I getting so little direct mail? I need my direct mail!!
Hold the phone. Even with all of these primaries, there will still be a significant number of voters who vote for in the state rep primary, but pass on the state wide races. Maybe they have me down as one of those?
Anyway, after this primary we may have conclusive proof that all politics is local, or conclusive proof that nobody cares about the Treasurer’s race.
Read the whole thing.
Another god post by Tobin! We’ve been friends for a long time and have a similar fascination with trying to parse the numbers for this primary. I see the same trends in the local elections. It’s something I call ‘local loyalty’, where voters go to the polls for their guy and that’s their only interest.
I think that in the 24th and 9th the ground game is important. 27th will be slightly uphill because of incumbency but the challenger will have money and troops from his union. In the 8th and 9th, I think that the influence of the sitting State Senators will have an impact for their candidates. Bruce Ennis has a general election challenge so we may see him making early use of his organization.
John continues to be right on the statewide candidates. I think that micro-trageting and voter contact by their organizations will be important.
After talking to John about turnouts, I now don’t see the Democratic turnout going above 10%. This is a downward revision of my projection of about 15%. Folks just aren’t interested in the statewide races. As someone who votes regularly, I am always disappointed in this degree of apathy and the subsequent feeling from some citizens that ‘their government’ has been taken away from them. Ideological shifts are usually in electing primary candidates. If you don’t claim it you don’t own it.
I love John Tobin’s analysis. Always a dream-come-true for political junkies.
My major caveat is that the US Rep. primary he referenced drew little interest b/c virtually nobody believed that Castle could be beat. So, the real driving factor for getting out to vote were the local contests.
I’m not sure how much interest, beyond those of us who blog here, there is in the statewide/countywide races this year.
So John is likely spot-on again. Perhaps the primaries in the lower portion of NCC will actually help Chip Flowers b/c there are relatively few primaries in Wilmington this year. So, there could be a cause/effect there as well.
El Somnambulo,
Thanks for your assessment of my analysis.
I had wondered about the same caveat, that maybe the lack of interest was a voter perception that the U.S. Rep candidates could not be serious contenders, so I looked at the 2004 Ins Commissioner primary where both contenders (Matt Denn & Karen Weldin Stewart) could be considered serious since both have since been elected as Insurance Commissioner. I found the same trend with more votes cast in state rep races.
I did a post on it this evening.
I plan to research this topic some more.