VA Governor primary, Deeds a clear preference among actual voters but low turnout makes one wonder about democracy in action here.  The polls had Deeds a clear favorite at the end (a dramatic improvement), so there isn't a big question as to whether the vote reflects sentiment in the larger population this week.  It probably does.  But when a candidate wins at just under 50% of those who vote, and about 6% vote, then the candidate is winning with about 3% of the voters supporting him.  Even granted that VA has an open primary and assuming Republicans are about 50% of the voters and did not cast significant votes, that's still only about 6% of non-Republican registered voters who voted for Deeds.

The total vote topped 320,000 or 6.4 percent of registered voters. That was well above the 250,000 that state officials expected, and over double the turnout in the 2006 Senate primary that was the most cited parallel.  --  EK @ 538

The idea that bad weather in No. VA was significant seems contradicted by this which says No. VA was much stronger than the rest of the state anyway --

Most of the state was experiencing turnouts of between 3 percent and 5 percent. In northern Virginia, turnout approached 10 percent while some southwest Virginia localities reported less than 1 percent turnout.

Marc Fisher posted a Q&A session about the VA primary.  Here is one answer he offered on this topic --

Marc Fisher: Many of the voters I spoke to earlier in the campaign talked about being full up on politics, thank you. They just didn't want to hear it anymore.

There are political scientists who have long argued that voter turnout in this country remains low in part because we have it so good here, and general satisfaction with life and government leads to apathy. If that theory were right, though, you might expect turnout to rise in tough times--unless there's also deep cynicism about government's ability to make real change in the economy or the rest of our lives.

Posted 7:10 p.m., 6.9.2009

Have Democrats become an apathocracy or a demo-un-cracy?