CNN data guru Harry Enten says the number of Democrats turning out to vote in this year’s primary contests will have Donald Trump and his team “running scared.”
Enten appeared on The Source with Kaitlan Collins on Thursday, discussing the significance of primary turnout ahead of November’s midterms.
This year, there are 35 U.S. Senate seats up for election, along with all 435 U.S. House seats. There are 36 gubernatorial elections. At the legislative level, there are primaries across 43 state Senates and 45 state Houses.
Currently, Republicans have narrow control of the House, 219-212, and the Senate, 53-47. They are broadly tipped to lose the lower chamber and possibly the Senate.
Enten said after tracking the number of Democratic voters in the primaries so far, he has found the turnout to be “absolutely bonkers huge.”
“The turnout numbers in the primaries are very good news for Democrats,” Enten said, calculating that across all the primaries this year there have been over 25 million Democrats turning out to vote so far.
That is already ahead of another “bonkers” year, 2018, with 23 million turning out in total for the entire primary season.
“So Democrats are already running ahead of where they were in 2018, which was a year in which they did extremely well in the House races—not nearly as well in the Senate races, but that map was tilted against them in a way that this year’s, simply put, is not,” Enten said.
Collins mentioned that Trump quotes Enten’s data “a lot,” and asked him what he’d be thinking right now if he was part of Trump’s White House team.
“I’m running scared,” Enten replied. “I’m running scared. You know, look, the numbers don’t lie. I tell it like it is. Whatever the numbers say, that’s where I go.”
He went on: “You see that turnout’s high so far on the Democratic side, that to me is emblematic of a president of the United States who is deeply underwater.”
Enten had the receipts for his claims, showing that ever since 2006, the party with the higher primary turnout went on to win the House of Representatives.
The data guru did have some bad news for Democrats, pointing out that Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, was a “weak candidate” with his net favorability at minus 13 percent, compared to other Democrats in Northern battlegrounds, especially Iowa’s Josh Turek who has a positive 18 percent rating.
Enten’s calculations follow an earlier prediction on Thursday that Democrats in the South could steer the party to an unusual wave of victories in the midterms
His tracking showed three Democratic candidates in Southern states—Sen. Jon Ossoff standing for re-election in Georgia, former Gov. Roy Cooper standing for Senate in North Carolina; and Senate candidate James Talarico in Texas—leading their Republican opponents by as high as double digits, according to various polls.
“So three Southern states, three former Confederate states, and you see that Democrats are leading in them all,” Enten said on Thursday.
“There has not been a Senate Democratic win in North Carolina since 2008. And in Texas, you have to go all the way back, since 1988, so it could in fact be a historic year for Democrats in these three Southern states.”
