I was studying results from the 2012 general election in CA on Sunday night. I noticed that only about 55% of eligible voters in the state voted at that time and CA’s 58 counties were split 29 Red (for Romney) and 29 Blue (for Obama). But …. most of the counties who voted R were rural or semi-rural and a significant amount of counties who voted D had huge populations (LA county being the largest with nearly 2.6M votes cast [~69% Dem]). Overall, 59.3% of CA votes were for Obama, 38.3% of the votes were for Romney and 2.4% of the votes were for “other” candidates (American Independent, Green Party, Libertarian and Peace & Freedom parties).
The wild card this year will be to see how many people (esp newly aged-in millenials) register to vote for the first time or finally decide to cast their vote after having not participated in elections in recent years as well as those who decide to re-register to change their party affiliation. This will be especially telling if there are little to no “protest candidates” on the ballot running for president to choose from.
I think 2016 is going to be a banner year for voter turnout. It’s going to be very interesting t see what will happen with the approx 10M people in CA who did not vote in the general election in 2012 but were otherwise eligible to register and/or vote.
ALL of the candidates would do well to plan tours stumping on the “CA public university campus circuit” this spring enabling them to energize hundreds of thousands of unregistered millenials in time to register to vote in the CA primary.
