It’s hard to make a 1:1 comparison but some blue political nerds on Twitter are amped because turnout was pretty freaking high in the Thursday night primary ahead of the April 16 special to replace now-New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill in the Garden State’s 11th District. At an estimated 91 percent counted per the New York Times‘s tracker, 61,382 votes were cast in the Dem primary, exceeding the 51,848 cast in the June 4, 2024 primary when now-Senator Andy Kim was challenging Gold Bars Bob Menendez statewide and the 37,948 in the 2022 D primary when Sherrill was running uncontested (probably because of something something machine politics).
The turnout surge could be chalked up to how tightly contested it was: Former Bernie Sanders aide Analilia Mejia leads former NJ-7 Dem Congressman Tom Malinowski by 0.79 percent and the race is still too close to call. Punchbowl News reports that AIPAC fucked themselves by spending against Malinowski for the sin of reading the room and being open to conditioning to Israel only to end up with Mejia in the lead and you already guessed that she’s not a skinnier female Randy Fine.
Contested or not it’s still noteworthy for turnout in a special election primary on a random Thursday night in February to be significantly higher than it was during the last two regular D primaries.