Turnout for Tuesday’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination contest is expected to be far from overwhelming. Political prognosticators forecast roughly 200,000 to 300,000 Democrats will head to the ballot box, out of more than 5 million registered voters in Virginia.
Elections officials have registered a net 38,000 new Virginia voters since November. That’s a relatively modest increase after Virginia saw a net gain of 436,000 new registrations between January and November 2008, a result of Virginia’s status as a battleground state in the presidential election.
With a small and unpredictable primary electorate, the three-way Democratic race could be decided by a few thousand votes, putting greater weight on get-out-the-vote efforts of each campaign.
“With a low turnout in a primary, you actually can affect the results with a good get-out-the-vote program, even if you’re only producing 10,000 or 15,000 additional votes for yourself,” said University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato. “That’s probably the margin of victory.”
Even a turnout of 5 percent would be larger than Democratic primaries in recent years. The June 2006 primary for U.S. Senate between Jim Webb and Harris Miller drew out 155,784 voters, or 3.45 percent. A four-way lieutenant governor primary a year before, in which Leslie Byrne emerged victorious, was decided by 115,379 voters, or 2.6 percent of the electorate.
