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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.

Still, the answer to the should-she-worry question is: probably not so much. The Democratic-primary turnout likely isn’t all that accurate a projection of the general elections. In the first place, people usually come out to vote under two conditions, according to Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who studies voter behavior: first, when races are competitive and, second, when they see a significant difference between the candidates. With a smaller field and a front-runner who has held on to that spot, the Democratic race has clearly been much less competitive than the Republican one, even if Sanders has proved to be a more relentless marathon runner than many people thought he’d be. If you’re a Bernie Bro or a “Yasss Queen” Clintonite, you might indeed see an enormous gulf between the two. But, in fact, most Democrats polled before Super Tuesday said they’d be satisfied with either Clinton or Sanders as their nominee (though most also saw Clinton as the candidate more equipped to defeat Trump). That’s a sharp contrast with the polarized Republican contest, and with the feeling a majority of Republican voters said they harbored of having been betrayed by their party’s leading politicians.


A general election pitting Clinton against Trump would offer about the most Manichaean contrast imaginable in American electoral politics, thus easily fulfilling McDonald’s second condition. And while it might not be that closely competitive—polls at this point show both Clinton and Sanders handily beating Trump in an electoral-vote contest—there’s an exception to the rule that people are more likely to vote when they perceive the contest as tight, McDonald said. Sometimes, voters are so horrified by a candidate that they come out to register their opposition, even when they’re reasonably confident he or she will lose. As an example, McDonald reminded me of the 2010 Senate election in Delaware, when the Republican candidate, Christine O’Donnell, a Sarah Palin-esque Tea Party favorite with a notional résumé and a penchant for saying things like “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” and “I’m not a witch,” lost definitively, in large part because people were so motivated to vote against her. Turnout was correspondingly high.

There’s good reason to expect that Latino voters would show up in unprecedented numbers to vote against Trump. For quite a while, we’ve been hearing speculation about how that could help Clinton in swing states like Colorado and Nevada. It may also be critical in Florida, a big battleground state whose Hispanic population has until recently been largely Cuban-American and, historically, more likely to vote Republican. The number of Hispanic voters registered as Democrats in Florida has been growing, however. In 2008, for the first time, more Latinos in the state were registered as Democrats than Republicans, and Barack Obama won both the Hispanic vote and the state. (In 2004, George W. Bush had won both.) Between 2006 and 2016, “the number of Hispanic registered voters increased by 61%,” according to a Pew Research Center analysis, “while the number of Hispanics identifying as Democrats increased by 83% and those having no party affiliation increased by 95%.” Much of that shift is due to the fact that, over the last decade, Puerto Ricans (who are U.S. citizens) have been settling in Florida in significant numbers, especially in and around Orlando, as economic conditions on the island have deteriorated. They’re more likely to vote Democratic, and the growth in their numbers is outpacing that of Cuban-Americans.