I only bothered looking up the statistics for California, but there I found 31% of registered voters showing up for the 2012 presidential primary elections, as opposed to 75% for the general election. (The statistics for eligible voters are somewhat lower, but more or less proportionally so.) That’s a significant difference, but we’re not talking an order of magnitude, and I’d be very surprised to find that that many people are politically engaged in more substantive ways.
I only bothered looking up the statistics for California, but there I found 31% of registered voters showing up for the 2012 presidential primary elections, as opposed to 75% for the general election. (The statistics for eligible voters are somewhat lower, but more or less proportionally so.) That’s a significant difference, but we’re not talking an order of magnitude, and I’d be very surprised to find that that many people are politically engaged in more substantive ways.