Last night’s Kentucky GOP governor’s primary was a real barn-burner, with Matt Bevin and Jamie Comer finishing within just a few votes of one another.
Whoever comes out on top after a possible recanvas or recount, Republicans accomplished something unprecedented in Kentucky last night, at least in modern times and perhaps in all the state’s history. They cast more ballots in a gubernatorial primary than the Democrats did.
This may sound strange for those who view Kentucky as a “Red” state, but it really isn’t. By registration, Kentucky is a Democratic state even now, albeit one that rarely votes that way any more on the federal level.
But it has become less Democratic over time. This seems to be reflected in the number of ballots cast for each party last night.
Here’s a bit of historical data on gubernatorial primary turnout to lend some context to what happened, leading up to last night’s total turnout numbers (which are of course unofficial):
Year —- GOP ——- DEM
1987 — 118,546 — 639,516
1991 — 164,570 — 506,646
1995 — 119,892 — 344,149
1999 — 40,170 — 124,289
2003 — 160,050 — 298,082
2007 — 203,864 — 357,354
2011 — 144,066 — 159,115
2015 — 214,188 — 176,160
(Note that all of these numbers come directly from the state website — Wikipedia’s entries, which I first browsed, are wrong, and dramatically wrong for certain years.)
We can make the excuse that this year’s Democratic primary wasn’t competitive, and that’s fine. But even in noncompetitive Democratic years, nothing like this has ever happened before. It surely reflects growing GOP voter registration in the Bluegrass State.
This doesn’t necessarily mean much for this particular general election — it didn’t in past elections when Democrats cast more primary ballots but Republicans won, as with Rand Paul in 2010 and Ernie Fletcher in 2003. But it goes to show that Democratic participation is lagging in Kentucky. Given that this squares with the 2014 election result, this is probably noteworthy.
The Republican Party in Kentucky has been growing over the last 20 years — as has the number of voters not affiliated with one of the two major parties — and the Democratic Party really hasn’t been growing much at all. The table below shows the state’s voters by party registration as of each general election since 1987 (whether they voted or not), with 2014 thrown in for good measure since no numbers have been published yet for 2015.
Year —- GOP ——- DEM —— OTHER
1987 — 557,644 — 1,330,620 — 62,979
1991 — 561,923 — 1,269,851 — 60,188
1995 — 690,966 — 1,424,592 — 132,223
1999 — 847,043 — 1,573,254 — 179,816
2003 — 944,197 — 1,585,818 — 175,438
2007 — 1,037,861 — 1,616,586 — 186,451
2011 — 1,100,930 — 1,639,005 — 204,667
2015 — 1,237,506 — 1,686,050 — 252,346
