"I hope there's big turnout," President Bush said at a final campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio, today, "it's good for our system." But it's probably not good for his reelection hopes. And the early evidence is that voters are breaking turnout records today.
Earlier, Tim Grieve told you about Kerry spokesman Mike McCurry's estimation that Bush-Cheney '04 looked favorably on a turnout of about 105 million to 108 million. Anything above that benefits the Democrats, the conventional wisdom goes. The Democrats were looking for about 118 million voters to turn out.
Grieve now reports from Boston that the Kerry camp's anecdotal evidence says turnout is somewhere in the 60 percent range, which translates to about 120 million voters. If it bears out, that is quite a surge from 2000, when 51 percent of Americans voted, or 106 million.
America hasn't seen turnout rates in the 60s since the '60s.
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