A weak message from the primary
Published 9:59 pm Thursday, June 15, 2017
The dissection of the 2017 Virginia primaries began even before the last of the Old Dominion’s voters had left the voting booths. Be sure of this: The spin will continue all the way into November — and probably through it, if recent history is any indication.
The predominant narrative from the left on Wednesday and Thursday was that Democrats are fired up and ready to turn their roiling hatred for President Donald Trump into huge gains in the statehouses and, they hope, some potential seats picked up in special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Left-leaning pundits make the case that 60 percent of the voters on Tuesday in Virginia were Democrats, demonstrating, they say, that they were far more motivated to vote than Republicans.
And there’s some sense to that conclusion. Just as anger and frustration can be great motivators, satisfaction and complacency tend to have the opposite effect.
But everyone should be careful just how much they make of breakdown of voters on Tuesday, because there’s one number that bears more significance than any: 17 percent. That’s right, only 17 percent of the commonwealth’s registered voters considered it important to vote on Tuesday.
To be sure, primary elections rarely gain much traction among voters. But the simple fact that this particular primary election failed to break the mold in this regard doesn’t say much for the story the left is trying to pitch about average Americans being so fed up with Trump that they’re ready to turn Republicans out of office en masse.
Instead, what we see here looks pretty much the same as what we always see following one party’s ascension to power. The party in power is now dozing at the wheel, and the opposition party has had some success mobilizing its base. But average Americans — the ones who are supposed to be so angry they’re ready to storm the gates of the White House — are basically uninterested in the politics at this point.
Perhaps after the last presidential election — and in light of the endless vitriol they see and hear from pundits and party leaders each day — they’d rather just wait until November, or at least fall, to think about politics.
We can only hope the pot-stirrers and malcontents from both parties will get the message.