From DKOS: What California's June primary might have told us about the midterms this November
Now that virtually all of the votes have been recorded, let’s talk about California.
Yes, we know: it has been a month since California held its primary elections, and some counties were still tallying votes over this past week. In fact, not everyone is completely done yet. With apologies to the rest of the nation, that’s just how we roll here in California.
The count is slow, for a variety of reasons: (a) the large proportion of California’s vote comes by mail, (b) there are ample grounds for provisional votes to be cast, meaning that the number of provisionals will, post-election, number into the hundreds of thousands, and, of course (c) this is a really, really big state. At last check, the state has just a tick over 19 million registered voters.
All of this means that, for fans of a fast-paced vote count, you’re simply out of luck. Because even in modest turnout, when it comes to the Golden State, you’re talking about millions of votes. Worse still, anywhere between 25-40 percent of those votes remain uncounted even on the morning after the election. So, alas, it takes a while to tally up all those ballots.
But now, the number of ballots remaining to be counted, at the very most, is under 20,000. Meanwhile, well over 7.1 million votes have been tallied. With that in mind, let’s discuss the implications about what we learned, because there are real conclusions that can be drawn from this primary. What’s more: the value of those conclusions, in part, lies in the fact that they confirm a lot of what we have suspected as those special election results have been piling up all cycle long.
KEY TO THE DEMOCRATIC WAVE, PART ONE—A BLUE TURNOUT SURGE
Here is a statistic that should blow your mind: San Francisco County’s turnout for this (at best) modestly-competitive primary election amounted to just over 61 percent of the turnout from the 2016 presidential election.
(For reference, the statewide ratio is just under 49 percent of November 2016 turnout.)
As we look at the 58 counties in the state, we will use the simplest (and, arguably, fairest) metric to compare turnout. As others have pointed out on social media, the comparisons between the 2014 and 2018 primaries are a bit skewed by the fact that the 2014 primary was, far and away, the lowest turnout primary in recent history. This was driven by the absence of a competitive Democratic primary for governor (Gov. Jerry Brown was seeking a second term), as well as the absence of a U.S. Senate race. With that in mind, we will compare this primary with the 2014 general election turnout, as it provides the best compromise between proximity (using 2010 stats would be swayed by the real probability of considerable shifts in population) and competitiveness.
The 10 counties where Democrats received the highest vote share for governor in June’s primary were as follows: San Francisco (89 percent of votes were cast for a Democrat), Alameda, Marin, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Sonoma, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Contra Costa, and Yolo. All 10 counties cast at least 70 percent of their votes for a Democratic candidate.
The 10 counties where Democrats received the lowest vote share for governor were generally smaller counties: Modoc (only 25 percent of votes were cast for a Democrat), Lassen, Tehama, Glenn, Shasta, Yuba, Kern, Colusa, Kings, and Sutter. All 10 of these counties cast less than 38 percent of their votes for a Democratic candidate.
In the “heavily blue” counties listed above, turnout was 97 percent of the 2014 general election turnout. But in the “heavily red” counties listed above, turnout was only 86 percent of the 2014 general election turnout.
What’s more: some of the biggest surges came in blue counties with substantial population. The aforementioned San Francisco County (which cast 253,000 votes) saw turnout at 109.7 percent of their 2014 general election turnout. San Mateo County (which cast 172,000 votes) turned out at a clip that was 104.6 percent of their 2014 general election turnout. Meanwhile, the only large red county (Kern County, home to Bakersfield) saw its turnout lie at 86.3 percent of their 2014 November turnout.
Even more chilling for Republicans in terms of turnout is that Democrats, in the brief history of the open primary in the state, have turned out in far better proportions in the general elections than in the primary. In the 2014 primary, Democratic candidates (Brown had a nuisance challenger that notched less than 1 percent of the vote) comprised 55 percent of the primary vote, while the Republicans accounted for 40 percent of the primary vote. By the general election, though, Brown pushed the advantage out to 20 points, a five-point improvement over the primary.
Democrats already outpolled Republicans in the open primary in one vulnerable GOP-held U.S. House seat (CA-49, where Democratic candidates led GOP candidates 51-48 in the primary). If a five-point swing between primary and general elections can be replicated in 2018, that would put no less than three other districts on the block where the D/R split was less than that (CA-10, CA-25, and CA-45), and put two others (CA-39 and CA-48) right on the knife’s edge, based on the partisan splits in the primary.
KEY TO THE DEMOCRATIC WAVE, PART TWO—THE BURBS
While it is debatable to describe any one county in California as wholly suburban, looking at individual Congressional districts tells us that, yes, the suburban swoon we saw as a reaction to the ascendancy of Donald Trump in 2016 appears to still be intact.
The Democrats have shown interest in a number of California House districts in their push to reclaim the majority. Let’s focus on the ones that can fairly be called “suburban” districts, and look at how far Republican primary performance in each of those districts has declined between the 2016 June primary and the 2018 June primary:
This analysis of vulnerable GOP-held seats doesn’t tell the whole story, either. Recall, of course, that in the 2016 primaries the GOP presidential nomination was already decided, while Bernie Sanders supporters were still invested in gaining a big late win for their candidate. Therefore, the turnout in the 2016 primaries was, by definition, skewed heavily Democratic. So for the GOP to be performing worse than they did in the 2016 primaries, which should’ve been a low water mark for them (more than two-thirds of the ballots cast were for Democratic presidential candidates!), is a real danger sign.
A key indicator of the suburban fade for the GOP can be found in one of the most ancestrally Republican chunks of territory in the West. Orange County includes territory that makes up four of the five vulnerable Republican-held districts listed above, and has spent most of its existence over the past century being synonymous with Republican politics.
In 2014, in the open gubernatorial primary, Republicans outscored Democrats in Orange County by an outsized margin (57-39). In 2018, the Democrats actually narrowly led the GOP in the O.C. (50-49). That’s a 19-point net shift, which is actually a bigger shift than occurred at the presidential level between 2012 and 2016 (when Hillary Clinton became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Orange County since the New Deal era).
Which brings us to our final conclusion, actually.
KEY TO THE DEMOCRATIC WAVE, PART THREE—TRUMPISM DOESN’T TRANSFER
If there has been a nightmare tendency to emerge from the 2017-2018 cycle thus far, it is that the Democrats appear to be getting “the best of both worlds” in terms of voter behavior.
We know, of course, that the electoral map was shaken dramatically by the Clinton-Trump presidential election in 2016. Tons of ink has been spilled chasing the Democratic underperformance in some ancestrally Democratic blue-collar corners of the nation, while comparably less has been said about the marked underperformance of the GOP ticket in reliably Republican suburban turf from coast to coast.
The aforementioned Orange County is actually an excellent example: Having voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 by a modest margin (52-46), the county shifted to the Democrats in 2016, as mentioned before, for the first time in 80 years, and by a comfortable margin (51-42).
Even in a reliably blue state like California, we saw some movement along these lines. In all, 38 counties saw Democratic presidential performance drop between Obama’s commanding victory in 2012 and Clinton’s even more commanding victory in 2016 (most were smaller counties, hence the improved performance statewide by Clinton, even as she underperformed Obama in the majority of the state’s counties.
Most of the movement, admittedly, was incremental. But we did see a total of 10 counties (mostly rural) where Hillary Clinton ran five points or more behind Barack Obama. These would be the “Trump surge” counties, such as they are in a state like California (Clinton still carried two of them—Lake and Mendocino).
And how did they perform in the June 2018 primary? The combined performance of the Democratic gubernatorial candidates ran, on average, 6.5 percent ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance. Indeed, in one-half of those 10 “Trump surge” counties, the Democrats actually ran ahead of both their 2012 and 2016 performances.
In all, for the 10 counties where the Democrats suffered the most comparative damage in 2016, they more than recovered their ‘16 losses in five counties, partially recouped their losses in four other counties, and only did marginally worse in one of them (smallish Tehama County in the northern part of the state).
Meanwhile, let’s look at the places where, in 2016, Hillary Clinton improved on the Obama baseline. Her 10 best counties (that is to say, counties where she ran ahead of the Obama 2012 totals by at least 1.9 percent) saw Democratic gubernatorial candidates actually continue that improvement, as the Democrats, on average, ran 0.9 percent ahead of the Clinton 2016 performance.
Finishing the comparison, we see that just one county saw the Democrats perform worse than either Obama or Clinton (Imperial County, one of the few counties with genuinely poor turnout in June). In addition, the GOP partially recouped their losses in only one county: Orange County. But that is also partially offset by two facts: (1) one of the two main GOP contenders for governor, state legislator Travis Allen, hails from Orange County, and (2) they still ran behind the Democrats in total votes for governor.
The other eight counties, which almost wholly consisted of large, populous counties, saw the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial field actually improve upon Obama and Clinton.
As I noted back in January, the nightmare scenario for the GOP is exactly this type of movement: what I would call an “asymmetric recovery.” If the GOP still is losing voters in the formerly purple-to-red suburbs but are not able to solidify their newly-created gains in blue collar and rural enclaves, they’re in deep trouble come November.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/7/8/1777698/-What-California-s-June-primary-might-have-told-us-about-the-midterms-this-November
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