http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/feb/10/gop-shatters-its-turnout-record-democrats-lag-behi/print/GOP shatters its turnout record; Democrats lag behind
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Republicans set a new turnout record Tuesday in New Hampshire's primary, attracting more than a quarter of a million voters to the polls and offering evidence that most of the energy in the 2016 presidential race continues to be on the GOP side.
Democrats saw a strong turnout, but their two-person race couldn't recapture the magic of the 2008 battle between Hillary Clinton and then-candidate Barack Obama — a race that presaged Mr. Obama's eventual cruise to victory in November.
Instead, this year it is Republicans who set a record. More than 263,000 votes had been recorded as of Wednesday morning, and 11 percent of precincts still had yet to report in. That puts the GOP above its own 2012 record of 248,000, and well within striking distance of the all-time record for either party, the nearly 290,000 votes cast in that 2008 Democratic primary.
The New Hampshire results follow last week's Iowa caucus turnout, where Republicans easily outdistanced Democrats by more than 50 percent.
Democrats, though, say they're still happy with their turnout, saying that on a per-candidate basis they did just fine, since there were only Mrs. Clinton and Sen. Bernard Sanders to draw voters on their side, compared to eight major GOP candidates.
"In Iowa our two candidates, along with Martin O'Malley, turned out 171,000 caucus-goers, compared to the ELEVEN Republican candidates — who ended up virtually in the same spot at 180,000," Democratic National Committee Chairman Luis Miranda said in a memo after Tuesday's voting. "We saw that same kind of enthusiasm in New Hampshire."
At of just after 7 a.m. Wednesday, with 89 percent of precincts reporting, 263,035 people cast votes in the GOP primary and another 231,311 voted in the Democratic primary.
Exit polling found that about 15 percent of voters in each primary said they were first-time voters — and the two iconoclastic candidates, Sen. Bernard Sanders on the Democratic side and businessman Donald Trump on the Republican side, each claimed the biggest share of those first-timers.
