Hillary Clinton wins Washington’s (nonbinding) Democratic presidential primary

Demo­c­ra­t­ic fron­trun­ner Hillary Clin­ton has swept to vic­to­ry in Wash­ing­ton’s 2016 Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry, which the par­ty won’t be using to allo­cate any del­e­gates to the 2016 DNC in Philadel­phia, ear­ly results show.

With 661,403 bal­lots cast and count­ed so far, Clin­ton has a healthy 47,973 vote lead over Bernie Sanders, and is ahead in the state’s most pop­u­lous coun­ties, includ­ing the Big Three (King, Pierce, and Snohomish).

How­ev­er, Jef­fer­son, San Juan, and Whit­man coun­ties — which tend to vote against Tim Eyman’s destruc­tive ini­tia­tives more reli­ably than any coun­ty except for King — were back­ing Sanders. So were vot­ers in What­com and Thurston counties.

Sanders also had leads in a num­ber of east­ern Wash­ing­ton coun­ties that don’t usu­al­ly sup­port Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates at any level.

Because the Wash­ing­ton State Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s Del­e­gate Selec­tion and Affir­ma­tive Action Plan pro­vides for nation­al con­ven­tion del­e­gates to be allo­cat­ed to can­di­dates through cau­cus­es, tonight’s pri­ma­ry results are essen­tial­ly a straw poll with a mas­sive num­ber of par­tic­i­pants. In oth­er words, they’re symbolic.

Sanders com­plete­ly rout­ed Clin­ton in the March 26th Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial precinct cau­cus­es and sub­se­quent April 17th leg­isla­tive dis­trict cau­cus­es, where the del­e­gates to the con­gres­sion­al dis­trict lev­el were chosen.

The just-held con­gres­sion­al dis­trict cau­cus­es on Sat­ur­day, May 21st pro­duced a statewide allo­ca­tion of sev­en­ty-four nation­al del­e­gates for Sanders, and twen­ty-sev­en for Clin­ton. This allo­ca­tion will be used at the State Con­ven­tion next month when the at-large and PLEO (Par­ty Leader and Elect­ed Offi­cial) del­e­gates — which rep­re­sent about a third of the total of pledged del­e­gates — are chosen.

State law requires elec­tions offi­cials to hold a pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry every four years, but in prac­tice, it has been held every eight years (when there is no incum­bent Pres­i­dent seek­ing reelec­tion). The Leg­is­la­ture opt­ed to fund the elec­tion in its bien­ni­al bud­get last year, and accord­ing­ly, it was duly held.

As elec­tions offi­cials stressed in the voter’s pam­phlet and else­where, what the par­ties do with the results is up to them. The par­ties have a First Amend­ment right to freely assem­ble, and it’s up to their gov­ern­ing bod­ies to decide what rules and pro­ce­dures to use in the nom­i­nat­ing of candidates.

The Wash­ing­ton State Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty has a long tra­di­tion of allo­cat­ing its nation­al con­ven­tion del­e­gates through the cau­cus and con­ven­tion cycle. The Par­ty’s State Cen­tral Com­mit­tee (which I am a mem­ber of) vot­ed over­whelm­ing­ly to stick with that tra­di­tion last year when it drew up its DNC-approved 2016 Del­e­gate Selec­tion and Affir­ma­tive Action Plan (DSAAP).

How­ev­er, 2016 may be the last cycle with a cau­cus-only DSAAP. An increas­ing num­ber of Demo­c­ra­t­ic activists have come to the con­clu­sion that it would be worth­while to incor­po­rate a pri­ma­ry into the DSAAP, while retain­ing the cau­cus­es for the pur­pos­es of del­e­gate selec­tion. This is the approach that I myself favor.

With a bind­ing pri­ma­ry, we’d get more par­tic­i­pa­tion than with the caucuses.

Uti­liz­ing a pri­ma­ry to allo­cate all the nation­al con­ven­tion del­e­gates would allow peo­ple who want to have a say in the nom­i­nat­ing process to par­tic­i­pate with­out hav­ing to show up at a cau­cus. Par­ty lead­ers would then be free to orga­nize cau­cus­es and con­ven­tions for a small­er num­ber of par­tic­i­pants who actu­al­ly want to be there. Those inter­est­ed in com­ing togeth­er in per­son to build a plat­form, run for del­e­gate, pass res­o­lu­tions, and meet Demo­c­ra­t­ic activists from their area would con­tin­ue to be able to do all those things in a hybrid primary+caucus system.

There’s no way of know­ing how the results would have turned out had today’s pri­ma­ry been a bind­ing elec­tion, with del­e­gate allo­ca­tion on the line.

As NPI’s Pres­i­dent Robert Cruick­shank has point­ed out, nei­ther of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns ran any GOTV (get-out-the-vote) oper­a­tions in advance of the pri­ma­ry. Still, it’s worth not­ing that Wash­ing­ton’s four mil­lion plus vot­ers were mailed bal­lots, and more than a quar­ter of them sent them back. There are still a lot of votes left to count, too, so the turnout will con­tin­ue to go up.

How does this com­pare to cau­cus turnout? Well, the state par­ty says around 230,000 peo­ple par­tic­i­pat­ed in this year’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial precinct cau­cus­es. So the uni­verse of vot­ers par­tic­i­pat­ing in the non­bind­ing, sym­bol­ic Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry (so far) is about three time bigger.

When mak­ing com­par­isons, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that the uni­verse of Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers in Wash­ing­ton is only a sub­set of the over­all elec­torate. I keep see­ing reporters and com­men­ta­tors mea­sure Demo­c­ra­t­ic cau­cus turnout against the total num­ber of reg­is­tered vot­ers. When you do that, it yields a fig­ure of around 6%. But this fig­ure is total­ly mean­ing­less, because not every Wash­ing­ton vot­er is a Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­er inter­est­ed in help­ing choose the par­ty’s nominees.

Let’s sup­pose, for the sake of argu­ment, that one in every four reg­is­tered vot­ers iden­ti­fies with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. There are cur­rent­ly 4,087,920 vot­ers on our state’s rolls at present, so that’s a uni­verse of 1,021,980 Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers. By doing some sim­ple arith­metic, we can see that 230,000 of 1,021,980 is 22.5%. That’s a much more respectable turnout fig­ure than 6%.

Of course, we can’t know for sure exact­ly how many of the state’s vot­ers con­sid­er them­selves Demo­c­ra­t­ic, since we don’t have par­ty reg­is­tra­tion in Wash­ing­ton. We can only guess and use sur­vey data to make our guess­es edu­cat­ed. Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters, we know what­ev­er the num­ber is, it’s a fluc­tu­at­ing figure.

In pres­i­den­tial years, the num­ber of vot­ers who tell poll­sters they’re Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers is marked­ly high­er than in midterm or local elec­tion years.

In 2012, for instance, Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Polling con­duct­ed sur­veys in which 36% of respon­dents iden­ti­fied them­selves as Democrats.

If we go by that four year old fig­ure and assume that 36% of Wash­ing­ton vot­ers are Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers, then our uni­verse is 1,471,651 vot­ers. 230,000 of 1,471,651.2 is approx­i­mate­ly 15.6%, which is still a lot high­er than 6%.

I’m impressed that although the mass media has been advis­ing vot­ers for weeks that the Wash­ing­ton Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry was only sym­bol­ic (and the Repub­li­can con­test over), more than a quar­ter of the state’s reg­is­tered vot­ers sent back their bal­lots any­way. And a major­i­ty of the returned bal­lots are Demo­c­ra­t­ic, befit­ting of Wash­ing­ton’s sta­tus as a blue state.

The last time Wash­ing­ton held a pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry was eight years ago, in 2008, dur­ing the mar­quee matchup between Hillary Clin­ton and Barack Oba­ma. Then, as now, the pri­ma­ry was held after the precinct cau­cus­es had been held. (Both events were in Feb­ru­ary, as opposed to March and May).

Oba­ma eas­i­ly defeat­ed Clin­ton in the cau­cus­es, then went on to win the non-bind­ing, “straw poll” pri­ma­ry by a much nar­row­er margin.

Oba­ma received 354,112 votes (51.22% of the total), while Clin­ton got 315,744 (45.67%). A total of 691,381 votes were cast in that elec­tion, com­pared to 661,403 this year. 111,200 bal­lots are on hand that have yet to be processed by coun­ty elec­tions offi­cials, accord­ing to the Sec­re­tary of State.

Assum­ing around half of those are Demo­c­ra­t­ic bal­lots, we are already on track to sur­pass the 2008 Demo­c­ra­t­ic turnout. That’s note­wor­thy, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing that 2016 Demo­c­ra­t­ic precinct cau­cus turnout did­n’t quite match the high-water mark set in Feb­ru­ary 2008 when Oba­ma and Clin­ton were squar­ing off.

It should also be not­ed that the 2008 pri­ma­ry took place much ear­li­er in the nom­i­nat­ing sea­son (Feb­ru­ary 19, 2008 — before many states had vot­ed), while the 2016 pri­ma­ry is tak­ing place rather late in the sea­son (May 24th, 2016 — with most states hav­ing already voted).

There may be a cor­re­la­tion between this year’s high­er turnout and Wash­ing­ton’s switch to vote-by-mail. For the 2008 elec­tions, vot­ers in urban coun­ties like King and Pierce were not mailed bal­lots unless they had reg­is­tered to vote absen­tee. Since then, how­ev­er, coun­ty elec­tions offi­cials have done away with polling places and every­one gets a bal­lot in the mail with three weeks to fill it out and return it.

That said, vote-by-mail has­n’t been a guar­an­tor of robust turnout. Last year, Wash­ing­ton expe­ri­enced its worst-ever gen­er­al elec­tion turnout since vot­er reg­is­tra­tion began in the 1930s. Mil­lions of bal­lots were mailed out, but most were not returned to a drop box or through the Postal Service.

The turnout we’re see­ing cer­tain­ly sug­gests many vot­ers were enthu­si­as­tic about par­tic­i­pat­ing in the state’s pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry, even if they knew the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty was­n’t going to uti­lize the results.

The cam­paigns may not have done any GOTV, but the dis­par­i­ty between the cau­cus results and the pri­ma­ry results is still striking.

Though the pri­ma­ry returns won’t influ­ence the del­e­gate allo­ca­tion, Hillary Clin­ton sup­port­ers can still take solace in know­ing that a great many of their friends and neigh­bors are for Clin­ton. She’s like­ly to be the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee in July, and she will need Wash­ing­ton in her col­umn to win the pres­i­den­cy this November.