California Voters Kicked Ass!

A couple of days ago I wrote a post saying that turnout in California had been lousy, probably because of our stupid jungle primary that frequently gives us uninteresting general election contests. But I based that on this data from the California Secretary of State:

Unfortunately, I didn’t know that the historical data was final while the current data was provisional, which means they weren’t even remotely comparable. In short, I totally blew it, and when I recalculated the numbers to give me turnout as a percentage of eligible voters (rather than registered voters) I was, of course, still way off. So what was the voter turnout in California? David Dayen has the approximate answer:

  • Total Election Day votes in the governor’s race: 7.3 million.
  • Total unprocessed votes as of today: 4.9 million.
  • Total eligible voters: 25.2 million.
  • There are still a few counties not reporting everything, so the total number of votes will continue to increase by maybe half a million votes. The likely final number of votes is approximately 12.7 million.
  • Total turnout when everything is finally finished: probably about 50 percent.

Here is a corrected chart:

Turnout in California was almost certainly a smidge higher than the national average. Unfortunately, we won’t have a final answer for another month or so. I don’t know why, but that’s how things work here in the center of the Resistance.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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