Attendance at Tuesday’s Utah’s Republican caucuses was down significantly from two years ago, and from the 2014 midterms.
According to a Utah GOP official, their best guess is around 35,000 Republicans statewide turned out for Tuesday night’s meetings. That’s about 1/3 of the more than 98,000 who showed up for the 2016 caucuses, which wasn’t surprising given that 2016 featured a competitive presidential race.
Tuesday’s GOP numbers were also down about 10-15% from the 2014 midterms.
That’s probably not the turnout organizers for “Keep My Voice” were hoping for. KMV planned to use the caucuses to gather signatures to get their initiative on the 2018 ballot, but low numbers on Tuesday won’t assist that effort much.
KMV needs to get more than 113,000 signatures statewide in a little more than three weeks. Several Republicans who spoke to UtahPolicy.com on background doubted they would get close to that number without a concerted paid signature gathering effort down the stretch.
Utah Democrats said they saw a larger than usual turnout in Cache and Utah County this year, and estimate their overall turnout was about 10-percent higher than the 2014 midterms. Needless to say, their numbers most likely did not come close to the big numbers they saw on caucus night in 2016.
The new United Utah Party says they had about 900 people show up for their caucus meetings in 18 locations across nine different counties.
