From Capitol Fax:
* There was an historic Republican turnout yesterday, and Democrats nearly matched their huge numbers from 2008. This may help explain the numerous ballot shortage troubles throughout the state.
According to unofficial tallies, 1,377,341 voters cast ballots for Republican presidential candidates. That’s a 48 percent increase over the 933,454 people who voted for GOP presidential candidates in 2012, and a 53 percent increase over the 899,422 who voted Republican in 2008.
Wow.
* Meanwhile, 1,971,059 Democrats voted for president yesterday, well above the 652,717 who took part in the uncontested race in 2012, and just below the historic high of 2,038,614 in 2008.
Turnouts for primary elections are not generally good predictors of turnouts for general elections. The Democrats had best hope that rule of thumb remains true. Although it’s extremely unlikely that any Republican candidate could carry Illinois, you don’t want to be forced to spend money shoring up what should be the easy states.
The Dem turnout was also near record, in a race that isn’t much of a race. Suspect there is some crossover, but think most of it is just jazzed up Republicans.
Steve
I don’t believe there are as many Republican voters in the city of Chicago as would be required for the Trump turnout that happened here.
Cruz gets 9 delegates from Illinois, and Kasich gets 6. Some of these appear to be because voters, particularly Trump voters, don’t understand that you essentially have to vote for the Presidential candidate four times. That’s how the establishment gets you !!!
Some reports that Trump had some foreign-looking names for a couple of delegates and were rejected, but the undervotes on delegates are high and there are some other oddities. In one district, James Kammer was selected as a delegate but not his brother(?) Nicholas Kammer. Does Nicholas sound too Russian? Is it later in the alphabet? Does any one family deserve more than one delegate spot?
Thinking about the Trump delegates. Who are they? Trump couldn’t get any state Republican politicians to sign-up for his campaign, so he relied upon a ballot access attorney who would know who to hire for the petitions to get circulated across the state, but who would he slate for the delegates? Were Trump delegates Nabi Fakroddin and Raja Sadiq firmly in the Trump camp or simply available for hire? I have no idea, but I’m wondering about all of the Trump delegates and what one could expect from them on the second round?
I don’t know what kind of policital system selects for the most disliked candidates but don’t think it qualifies as democratic. Party politics have left this country in quite a bind.