There were three more Presidential primaries yesterday - Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC. Turnout in all three of them was high yesterday, at least on the Democratic side. The numbers for all three areas are good, but I'm most excited by the Maryland numbers.
In 2004, Democratic candidates received a combined total of 481,476 votes in the Maryland presidential primary. As of right now, Barack Obama has 457,053 votes. That's the figure with 96% of precincts reporting. It doesn't include the absentee ballots, and it doesn't include the provisional ballots that were cast during the extended voting hours that were added because they were having a flipping ice storm there yesterday.
In Virginia, Democratic candidates received a combined total of 396,223 votes in 2004. Obama currently has 623,141 votes, and the combined total is near 1,000,000.
It's enough to make you think that people are actually getting interested about politics.
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Or maybe it's just that the race is still competitive, while it wasn't at this point last time around.
That said, it's a lot easier to get excited about Hillary or Obama than John Kerry.
It was hard to vote yesterday! It took me three hours to get from work to the polls instead of 45 minutes. Accidents everywhere. But there were a lot of people out... most of whom wished they'd voted in the early morning instead.
Another lovely way to think about it: in all three of these primaries, the difference in votes between Obama and Clinton is greater than the total number of votes cast in that primary for McCain; in Maryland (so far, numbers on CNN right now) the difference is almost fifteen times as many votes than McCain got.
But is that meaningful? Didn't CNN point out that in 1988 the Dem primaries massively outpolled the Republicans, but Bush Sr. still won...
African Americans are coming out in force on this election which is good news to me. The other group coming out is the kids who are 18+ and this is their first election. They're getting motivated to get out the vote.
Obama is doing amazingly well.
According to the exit polls at CNN, 5% of democratic voters in MD and 6% in VA had never voted before. Even more impressive, 12% in MD and a whopping 31% in VA had never voted in a primary before.