President Trump's massive primary turnouts set records

FPI / February 16, 2020

Though he essentially has no competition for the Republican presidential nomination in his 2020 re-election bid, record numbers of voters are turning out to vote for President Donald Trump in the primaries.

Trump shattered the previous records for incumbents in both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

“The results highlight the degree to which Trump’s base is energized,” Alex Isenstadt noted in a Feb. 16 analysis for Politico.

Trump received more than 31,000 votes in the Iowa caucuses. That number surpassed the 25,000 Democrats who turned out for Barack Obama in Iowa in 2012 and was more than four times the number of Republicans who caucused during George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.

Political analysts said the president’s vote totals in New Hampshire were astounding. Trump received 129,696 votes, more than doubling Obama and Bush's totals.

“There is a personal vote for Donald Trump that is unshakeable,” said John Couvillon, a Louisiana-based pollster who has been tracking the primary totals. “Republican voters are willing to go out" to vote for Trump even though he doesn't have a formidable primary challenge.

Couvillon said early totals in Tennessee, which holds its primary on March 3, show Republican turnout in the state is down only 3 percent from 2016 when the party was in the thick of a highly competitive primary.

The Democrats’ partisan impeachment and insistence that they will continue to pump taxpayer money into investigating Trump has “lit a fire under the Trump base — and I anticipate it will burn until Election Day in November,” said former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, chairman of the pro-Trump Republican Jewish Coalition. “Voter intensity is a key element in electoral success.”

Isenstadt wrote that Trump’s get-out-the-vote initiative in 2020 is like “George W. Bush’s strategy on steroids.”

“The strategy has echoes of 2004 and 2012, when Bush and Obama built up massive organizations while the rival party fought among themselves in splintered primaries,” Isenstadt wrote. “Both presidents used the advantage of time to develop get-out-the-vote operations, raise money, and contact supporters well in advance of Election Day.”

Scott Jennings, who served as a top political aide in the George. W. Bush White House, said: “This is the problem that every party finds itself in when it's running against an incumbent president. Trump is going to be difficult to beat, just like Obama was difficult to beat and just like Bush was difficult to beat.”

Trump’s 2020 campaign has yet to announce whether it will mount get-out-the-vote operations for the next set of Republican primary contests on Super Tuesday, March 3. Trump is slated to hold a rally in North Carolina on March 2 before the state votes the following day.

Free Press International