As reported yesterday Scott County’s Republican primary turnout rate appears to have been down an astounding 39% over 2010, a comparable non-presidential year with a contentious statewide primary decision to be made. We have not been able to analyze Republican state turnout rates yet, however the raw numbers indicate a turnout over 30% or so lower compared to 2010. So it appears the Scott County Republican turnout was substantially worse than the statewide Republican turnout. Here are the statewide raw numbers .
Using raw vote totals for candidates at the top of the ticket in a contentious well publicized race should be very close to actual turnout. Some people do not vote a particular race but we believe that number is negligible in this case.
Votes statewide for Republicans candidates in 2010 gubernatorial primary
Terry Branstad 114,450 50.3%
Bob Vander Plaats 93,058 40.9% Rod Roberts 19,896 8.8%
Total votes cast statewide in 2010 — 227,404
Votes statewide for Republicans candidates in 2014 U.S. Senate primary
Joni Ernst 88,692 56.12%
Sam Clovis 28,434 17.99%
Mark Jacobs 26,582 16.82%
Matt Whitaker 11,909 7.54%
Scott Schaben 2,270 1.44%
Write-ins 144 0.09%
Total votes cast statewide in 2014 — 158,031 (unofficial)
Raw vote totals indicates that the statewide 2014 Republican primary turnout was 69.49% of the 2010 raw turnout, or about 30.5% less. Over 69,000 less Republicans voted statewide in 2014 than did in 2010. In fact the 2014 top vote getter Ernst at 56% of the votes cast, received substantially less votes than fairly distant second place finisher Vander Plaats received in 2010.
Comparing Linn County and Scott County
We recognize that different county to different county comparisons of turnout can be problematic similar to same county comparisons year over year. But divergence from statewide results might be worthy of comment. We prefer comparing turnout rates (the percentage of registered Republicans that voted in a jurisdiction) in these matters because party registration figures change and a more accurate relative performance picture emerges when those rates are compared (which is what we did yesterday for Scott County). However raw totals can indicate a significant difference.
Scott County is Iowa’s third largest county. The next larger county (second largest in the state) is Linn (Cedar Rapids). Linn County saw 13584 Republicans vote in the top ticket race (gubernatorial) there in 2010. In the just finished 2014 Republican primary, the turnout for the top ticket race (U.S.Senate) was 9494. The results in Linn County are that 4090 less Republicans voted in 2014 than did in 2010.
As a raw numbers comparison, not one of comparing percentages of turnout rates year over year, that means 2014 turnout in Linn County was 69.89% of the 2010 turnout, slightly better than the statewide figure provided above, but roughly consistent.
A meaningful amount of inconsistency exists for Scott County compared to the state figure and the Linn County figure. Scott had 9905 votes cast in the Republican 2010 top ticket gubernatorial primary. Only 6482 votes were cast in the 2014 U.S. Senate primary. The difference is 3423 fewer Republicans showing up in 2014. That represents 65.44% of the raw number turnout in 2010. Comparing to the statewide figure and the Linn figure, Scott was at least 4% worse still.
A number of possibilities come to mind as to what caused the downfall in primary voter turnout and the vote spread (winner and also rans) statewide. Those reasons will apply in large part to Scott County, and we will offer our opinion as to possible reasons along with why Scott county turnout was significantly worse than even the statewide results.
