Plan B Forum

Donald Trump Is Not Expanding the GOP

A POLITICO analysis of early-voting data shows little evidence for one of the Republican nominee’s core claims.

Donald Trump likes to say he has created a political movement that has drawn “millions and millions” of new voters into the Republican Party. “It’s the biggest thing happening in politics,” Trump has said. “All over the world, they’re talking about it,” he's bragged.

But a Politico analysis of the early 2016 voting data show that, so far, it’s just not true.

While Trump’s insurgent candidacy has spurred record-setting Republican primary turnout in state after state, the early statistics show that the vast majority of those voters aren’t actually new to voting or to the Republican Party, but rather they are reliable past voters in general elections. They are only casting ballots in a Republican primary for the first time.

It is a distinction with profound consequences for the fall campaign.

If Trump isn’t bringing the promised wave of new voters into the GOP, it’s far less likely the Manhattan businessman can transform a 2016 Electoral College map that begins tilted against the Republican Party. And whether Trump’s voters are truly new is a question of urgent interest both to GOP operatives and Hillary Clinton and her allies, who have dispatched their top analytics experts to find the answer.

“All he seems to have done is bring new people into the primary process, not bring new people into the general-election process … It’s exciting that these new people that are engaged in the primary but those people are people that are already going to vote Republican in the [fall],” said Alex Lundry, who served as director of data science for Mitt Romney in 2012, when presented Politico’s findings. “It confirms what my suspicion has been all along.”

For this analysis, Politico obtained voting statistics from GOP officials and independent analysts in the handful of states that have so far released such information. To varying extents, the findings rebut both of Trump’s central claims: that he has brought in waves of new voters and that he has attracted flocks of Democrats. Among the highlights:

In Iowa, the Republican caucus turnout smashed its past record by 50 percent this year, jumping from 121,000 to nearly 187,000. But, according to figures provided by the state party, 95 percent of the 2016 caucusgoers had previously voted in at least one of the past four presidential elections—and almost 80 percent had voted in at least three of the past four.

The new caucusgoers, in other words, are likely to vote in November anyway.

In South Carolina, which also saw record turnout, data from the state GOP show that first-time voters amounted to 8.4 percent of the GOP electorate. But triple that amount—roughly 25 percent—were only first-time voters in a Republican primary. Even with historically high turnout, the data from the state party show that the Trump-led ballot brought almost exactly the same number of former Democratic primary voters into this year’s GOP primary as a Trump-free ballot did four years ago.

And in Florida, one of the nation’s most critical battleground states, Republican primary turnout jumped by 40 percent from 2012 to 2016. But only 6 percent of those who voted in the 2016 Republican primary did not vote in either of the 2012 or 2014 general elections and were registered to vote then. That amounts to a lot of people—about 142,000—but it’s a fractional share of a populous and fast-growing state that has added almost 1 million voters to the rolls since the beginning of 2012.

Certainly, in a tight race—Florida was decided by 537 votes in 2000—Trump’s new voters could prove significant, even decisive. But they are not suggestive of a candidate wholly remaking the composition of the electorate or reshaping the entire political landscape.

“There is no question he brought some people out but relatively speaking it’s not a huge number when it comes to a general election,” said Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida who has studied voter turnout patterns and who calculated the Florida figures for Politico.

It’s difficult to quantify exactly what share of the inflated 2016 primary turnout is inspired by Trump. Many states have yet to release detailed data and even among those that have a patchwork of different voting rules, the fact that some new young voters register every cycle and the notion that many Republicans could have turned out to oppose Trump—remember, he began winning a clear majority in states only recently—make such calculations nearly impossible.

But the data so far point away from a massive movement of new voters or Democrats flocking to Trump.

“I think the glass is half full,” Smith added, looking at the numbers from Trump’s perspective. “But it’s a small glass — maybe a shot glass.”

So Trumpty won the nomination by getting a majority of existing Republicans

Lord Jim wrote:Oh great, Keith Olbermann...the mentally unbalanced clown who even managed to get fired from Gore TV...

Now there's the go-to guy for respectable analysis...