What California's June primary might have told us about the midterms this November

[Algernon Moncrieff]

Kos

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.