Analysis of California Democratic Presidential Primary Vote—While Waiting for Late Vote By Mail Ballots

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Frank D. Russo

Hillary Clinton has 51.9% of the vote to Barack Obama’s 42.4% with 95.4% of the vote counted in California—but with what is probably on the order of a million vote by mail ballots that were cast late and need to be verified and placed in line for counting later today along with some additional provisional ballots where there was some question about the voter’s right to cast them.

The numbers may very well change as these additional ballots are counted, but several conclusions can be drawn from them while we wait for the final results. Before we delve into the county distribution of votes for patterns revealed, there is one larger pattern that needs to be reported, that will not change—even as the exact numbers change with straggling votes coming in as we write this article.

Of the 6.3 million ballots counted for Presidential candidates, 63% or over 4 million were cast in the Democratic primary and only 32% or 2.3 million and counting were cast in the Republican primary. Democrats and decline to state a party voters who participated in the Democratic primary far outperformed normal voting patterns in California. Democrats hold a 10 point margin in voter registration over Republicans in this state and decline to state voters account for 19% of registrations. There is a 31% spread between the Democratic primary vote here and the Republican primary vote.

Put another way, both Hillary Clinton who has over 2 million votes counted and Barack Obama who has over 1.6 million votes counted dwarf the winner on the Republican side, John McCain who received under a million votes—and Clinton’s total alone approaches the entire Republican vote.

This was a spirited race on the Democratic side which saw many more first time young voters and Latino, Black, and Asian voters participating. When the final numbers are crunched and analyzed, and the spirit of involvement by many in volunteering and engaging on the Democratic side are written about, this bodes well in the Golden state in votes in November for the nominee of the Democratic Party.

John Edwards received 4.3% of the Democratic vote and does not appear to have bettered the 15% threshold in any Congressional District to be eligible for any delegates—so California ‘s rich prize will be awarded to Clinton and Obama, with Clinton receiving more delegates—but the final distribution being a bit more evenly split than the popular vote statewide. These numbers will not be known definitively for a day or days.