California Voters Kicked Ass!

A couple of days ago I wrote a post saying that turnout in California had been lousy, probably because of our stupid jungle primary that frequently gives us uninteresting general election contests. But I based that on this data from the California Secretary of State:

Unfortunately, I didn’t know that the historical data was final while the current data was provisional, which means they weren’t even remotely comparable. In short, I totally blew it, and when I recalculated the numbers to give me turnout as a percentage of eligible voters (rather than registered voters) I was, of course, still way off. So what was the voter turnout in California? David Dayen has the approximate answer:

  • Total Election Day votes in the governor’s race: 7.3 million.
  • Total unprocessed votes as of today: 4.9 million.
  • Total eligible voters: 25.2 million.
  • There are still a few counties not reporting everything, so the total number of votes will continue to increase by maybe half a million votes. The likely final number of votes is approximately 12.7 million.
  • Total turnout when everything is finally finished: probably about 50 percent.

Here is a corrected chart:

Turnout in California was almost certainly a smidge higher than the national average. Unfortunately, we won’t have a final answer for another month or so. I don’t know why, but that’s how things work here in the center of the Resistance.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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