Quarter of a million people turned out for the Democratic caucuses on Saturday. No wonder they were crowded and noisy.
That’s including the 10,000+ that showed up in Thurston County. But like our attendance in Thurston County, if you put it against actual voter turnout, caucus turnout is depressing.
In 2007, there were 3,288,642 registered voters in Washington. If you double the caucus turnout to include Republicans (which I think is generous), you still only get 15 percent turnout. That’s not great.
For only the Democratic primary two years ago, over 600,000 ballots were cast.
Obviously, primaries get better turnout than caucuses, but when we talk about caucus turnout, we should compare it to the participation we usually see and not just throw out raw numbers. 250,000 is better than four years ago, but nowhere near as good as we could be doing.
Plus, from the looks of things, we hardly had the capacity to take care of the 250,000 good people that attended their caucuses.
In fact, the Washington caucuses were the largest caucuses in the nation with more attendence than in any other state. This is what it looks like anyway.
Says Particle Man
Well, I wouldn’t expect anything else. Washington is the largest state still using caucuses.
Now, you have me onto something else, compared to other states that use the same system, I wonder how well attended our caucuses were.