2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Hillary Is Not Ahead By 3 Million Votes [View all]LisaM
(27,801 posts)I think I read that the entire number of voters participating in the Democratic caucus in March was something like 230,000. Extrapolating 73% out of that would only net Sanders around 176,000 votes (loose estimate). But it's also a bit of a false equivalency, because you don't really cast votes, instead, you align up in a room and choose delegates. They also round off to the nearest whole, so that the percentages don't completely match up to the actual "votes" cast (2.3 vs. 4.7 would, for example, be rounded off to 2 and 5). This may have slightly inflated Bernie's delegate count, but either way, if they counted one person, one vote (again, a false equivalency), his net gain in votes would not be that much. He vastly benefited from this in Washington because he picked up the delegate equivalent of a much larger voting base.
From what I read of other caucuses, most have equally arcane systems (and they also had very low turnout). If Washington had a primary (well, we do, but it won't count), Bernie would have won comfortably, but I don't think he would have won by as much.
Caucuses completely dampen turnout.