2024 Primary Election Turnout, Part One

By Adam Pagnucco.

Precinct data for the 2024 primary is available and we will analyze it in several posts. Let’s start with turnout.

The pie chart below shows the distribution of actual voters (non-registered voters) in the 2024 primary in Montgomery County.

MoCo is dominated by Democrats, and that was especially true in the primaries. While the presidential primaries were never in question, MoCo Democrats were called upon to decide hard-fought races for the U.S. Senate and Congressional District 6. (Republicans had their own hard-fought primaries in the last race.) We’ll get to turnout numbers shortly, but first, let’s look at voting methods.

The pie chart below shows the distribution of voting behavior among Democrats.

Nearly half of MoCo Democrats cast their ballots by mail, demonstrating the continued popularity of mail in the wake of the pandemic. Election Day was the next with more than a third of votes cast.

Now let’s look at the MoCo Republicans.

Republicans’ mode shares are the inverse of Democrats’. Nearly half of MoCo Republicans voted on Election Day, and more than a third voted by mail.

And now the independent voters.

An absolute majority of independent voters cast their ballots by mail, their mode choices more closely resembling those of Democrats than Republicans.

The choice of voting method is one of the biggest changes I’ve seen in local elections in the past two decades. In the 2006 MoCo primary, the first local election I volunteered in, 87% of the votes were cast on Election Day, 8% of the votes were cast via provisional ballots, and 5% of the votes were cast by mail. Early voting did not exist. Now, mail voting is the most popular method of voting, at least among Democrats and independent primary voters, and early voting is too widely used to ignore.

This change has caused campaigns to behave differently. Choosing the timing of paid communications is one of the most important decisions a campaign can make. Historically, most mail—the dominant form of mass communication for most local campaigns at the time—was sent out two to three weeks before Election Day. This year, voters began receiving their ballots in the mail six weeks before Election Day. That stretches the communications calendar and makes resource allocation decisions more complex than they were 20 years ago. Campaigns that raise money early and understand voting methods—and especially which voters choose which methods—have an advantage over those who are ignorant of such patterns.

We then study the turnout percentages per party and region.