A vanishingly small amount of voters actually determine who leads us
I was curious and looked up the numbers on U.S. Census data. The numbers are from Nov. 2014 and have no doubt changed somewhat, but it's probably a ballpark idea.
219 million people are eligible to vote. 23 million have voted in the Democratic primary so far in 2016. No doubt California will change that quite a bit. 4.8 million people voted in California's primary in 2008.
So we could probably ballpark that to about 30 million total Democratic primary votes by the end of things. Give or take.
Popular vote totals at present are Clinton - 56.5% (about 13 million) vs Sanders - 43.5% (about 10 million).
But here's the stat I was curious about, which led to looking this up.
Out of 219 million people eligible to vote, about 13.6% of them are bothering in the Democratic primary. Assuming Democratic percentages remain static (they may not after California, but just for the sake of simplicity), that means, in this primary 7.6% of eligible voters will have voted for Clinton and 5.9% will have voted for Sanders.
I'm not sure how caucuses would be included in these numbers. Maybe someone with more time would want to parse that out (I'm just doing a quick hit and run before a BBQ). Mixing in caucus totals, which isn't possible for some states, you might bump that up a bit.
But still. Americans really aren't that engaged. Certainly not as much as you'd hope they be. And given what the event card is looking to be in November, I'm really curious to see turnout.
Disclaimer - Again, I realize there's a problem where caucuses don't provide popular vote totals. That's why I said, I was just curious about the ballpark.
