The Utah GOP will skip a primary in 2024, instead sending its members to a caucus for choosing presidential and congressional candidates. What are the consequences of that decision?
Nationally, every caucus state underperforms every primary state, and other realities of voter participation.
In 2020, multiple states didn’t fund presidential primaries for their parties, so five states’ Democratic parties held party-run primaries, where they used various party-supported methods to get ballots from their voters. Those didn’t work very well in getting turnout, and neither did caucuses.Note Utah’s jump from 4.2% turnout in 2016 to 10.2% turnout in 2020 on the Democratic side.
The problem comes down to how we understand who votes in an election. On the ballot, there’s no question about gender, race, income etc., and rightfully so. That means in order to learn who shows up to vote, we rely on high sample-size exit polling to understand who turned out. In college, I participated in the Utah Colleges Exit Poll in the 2012 election — which meant I stood outside of a polling place and asked people who had just left the voting center about who they were and how they voted.
Unlike Panagopoulos, I want to zoom in on Utah. So I looked at 631,000-odd total participants, got just the data from the 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 presidential election years, and compared three different groups:• Utahns who voted in a caucusIn many demographic metrics, it’s a sliding scale: people who tend to vote in primaries at all are already a little different than the overall population. People who participate in caucuses tend to be even more different.
Age is a part of this story, but so too is time; those who are retired and without children just have more time to attend a caucus night than those who don’t. Caucus goers were also more likely to be single than the overall population — though politics nerds might consider a caucus night a great date night, most folks probably wouldn’t.
More renters voted in caucuses than primaries . That being said, renters made up a far smaller part of both groups than they do in the state overall .
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