Interesting story about the number of votes casted.

Trump Has Won More Votes Than Romney Had At This Point in 2012
And many more than McCain had in 2008, too.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/trump-has-won-more-votes-than-romney-had-at-this-point-in-2012/article/2001230

Donald Trump has yet to win an outright majority in a primary or caucus – though he's getting closer, pulling in 46 percent of the vote in Nevada. But he's winning massive numbers of votes.

Mitt Romney won Nevada's caucus in 2012 with about 50 percent of the vote. He did so by pulling in roughly 16,000 total votes – roughly the same number that second-place finisher Marco Rubio pulled in this year. Donald Trump, by contrast, more than doubled Romney's total, garnering 34,500 votes.

That pattern has played out across all of the early states, which are seeing huge Trump-inspired (and, at some level, anti-Trump-inspired) turnout. All told, Trump has now won approximately 420,000 votes. After the first four states had voted in 2012, Mitt Romney had won about 311,000 votes. Back in 2008, meanwhile, eventual nominee John McCain had won a little more than 250,000 votes after Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada had voted.

Before the primaries got underway in earnest, many assumed that Trump would fare more poorly than his poll numbers indicated because so many of his supporters had rarely voted in the past. But with this election, the past has not been a reliable predictor of future events.
 

Last edited by Common Sense (2/24/2016 9:45 am)

I agree the vote count in a primary does not equal a win in the general election.
But when you look at the Democratic turn out which was 30% less than in 2008 and then
what the republican turn out was. It's a long, long road to November 8th 2016.
In this wacky election year anything could happen.

When I see these numbers in primaries, I don't get too worked up.  I think the numbers of Republican registered voters is something like 28% nationwide.  So doing a little math tells me if some guy gets 40% of the vote in a primary, that means the candidate might garner 10 or 12 votes out of 100 in a nationwide election if everything fell along party lines.

I think some people (not us wise and wary Exchangers) see numbers like 40, 50, or even 60 percent of the 'vote' and forget it might represent 40, 50, or 60 percent of 25 or 30 percent of actual voters when it comes to a national election.

Anyway, watch for the number of independent or unaffiliated voters to continue to rise and eventually outnumber the number of people who join a political tribe.

 

But, if those unaffiliated voters come to the polls in November and face a choice between Candidate R and candidate D, what is the point?  -  Goose

I figure it would force both tribes to offer up better candidates since neither team would be able to count on the single-lever pullers.  Secondly, the mucky-mucks that run both the RNC and DNC would have to pay more attention to the people they are asking us to elect and carry their team flag into battle.

The fact that both Trump and Sanders are being taken more seriously by tribal leaders tells me team membership will continue to decline over time.