If the 2016 Presidential election were held today with Hillary Clinton (D), Donald Trump (R) and Gary Johnson (L) as the candidates, I believe the electoral votes would come out far more skewed than than what the most recent national polls suggest. When looking at what States are safe for candidates and which ones candidates have a strong lead I would place Clinton as currently receiving 285 electoral votes, Trump receiving 189 and 64 electoral votes up for grabs. So even if Trump was able to grab all the states that are too close to call, he would still lose. The only way I really see this election getting interesting is if Gary Johnson can pull enough votes to get his home state of New Mexico and Trump gets all the states I’ve marked as toss ups along with North Carolina, where Clinton has a smaller lead. Johnson is currently polling at 10% or higher so he has the chance to make the election interesting if he gets enough support to win a state. If he doesn’t get that level of support, he is unlikely to be a spoiler for either Trump or Clinton as he draws roughly equal support from disenfranchised members of each their parties. So unless Trump kicks it up a notch and Johnson gains enough momentum to win his home state, we will have a President Clinton. If Johnson and Trump are successful then the vote would go to the House of Representatives who would choose from the top three finishers. So this election will either be a boring repeat of 2012 or very interesting as it’s fueled by the dislike of two very polarizing candidates.

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So there was comment on Google+ today stating that the, “Democrat turnout is 20%+ down this year.” The commenter felt this this was significant because “none of the polls account for the fact” and that in both 2008 and 2012 the primary turnout was far higher than this year.

I like to question numbers so I decided to take a look at the numbers used by Breitbart which appeared to be the source of the 20% figure. For 2012’s numbers I used a report from the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Note: The Breitbart graphic has an error listing the percent difference as 2012 v 2016 when it’s 2008 v 2016.

After entering the data and removing the states for which there was no applicable data in 2012, I found the 2008 to 2012 turn out change to be technically accurate but misleading when you look at the intermediate primary and those previous to 2008. When comparing to 2012 the 2016 Democratic primaries will increase by over 124% and will have a better turn out than 1996, 2000 and 2004. Really 2008 was the anomaly in recent years with such a high primary voter turn out. So to address the original commenters statements the 2016 Democratic Primaries turnout are lower than 2008 but they are the second highest in the past six elections. Really though none of this matters as “Primary Turn Out Means Nothing For The General Election“. Primary turn out is such an unreliable indicator that you are really gambling if you are using that as a metric for what the General Election would look like.

Really neither the Republican or the Democratic candidate will be my pick in this race. I plan to vote for Gary Johnson, presuming he gets the Libertarian nomination.

Link to my document if you want to more easily compare on your own.