Clinton Spox on Low Dem Turnout: ‘Primary Not a Great Predictor’ of the General

BANFIELD: “Kristina Schake joins me now. She’s the deputy communications director for Hillary for America. And obviously she’s smiling.”
SCHAKE: “Yes.”
BANFIELD: “The first thing, I thought when you were going to be lining up to come up here with Michigan Sh-Michigan, right?”
SCHAKE: “Yes.” 
BANFIELD: “There must be some huge psychology for your camp with what looked like it was going to be a five-state. We’re waiting on a 0.2 difference between candidate and Bernie Sanders from Missouri. But four states ain’t bad.”
SCHAKE: “It was just protecting the night for Hillary. I mean she won substantially in Florida, in Ohio, in North Carolina. She just had an exceptional night. And I have to say that she moved ahead again in the delegates. We are 300-plus delegates ahead of Senator Sanders, so she has a commanding lead this race.”
BANFIELD: “Which may be why she started using a lot more of that language she did before, she started to talk a little bit more like the candidate and that made it back fire. So she’s back to talking almost like the candidate again, moving into the general. But I want to throw out some voter turnout numbers on the screen because I think it’s really significant to see this trend. There are a lot of downward arrows under the Democrat, in each of the states that went to the polls yesterday, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, all down in voter turnout. Look at Ohio at the bottom 49 percent down. What? And look at the Republicans, all green arrows. Every one of those states up, and up by a lot. And look at Ohio up by 75 percent. I get it, I know what was going on in Ohio, everybody talked about people coming out either for Trump, switching over from Democrats for him switching over from Democrats to block him. That could happen in the general as well.”
SCHAKE: “Well, you know, what happens in a primary isn’t a great predictor of what’s going to happen in the general election. You know, usually the party that’s in the White House has lower turnout in the primaries, they’re just tends to be more attention on the other side of it. So historically, this is what happened and it’s not a great predictor of what’s going on happen in the general election.”
BANFIELD: “You don’t think —“
SCHAKE: “I think we’ll have a —“
BANFIELD: “— predictor or what’s happening or what’s going to happen?”
SCHAKE: “You know, but President Obama lost Pennsylvania, he lost Ohio in that primary. He came back to win both of those states.”
BANFIELD: “A million votes different. A million, a million people is an election sometimes, right. Look at Bush/Gore.”
SCHAKE: “But, you know, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the person who’s received the most votes than any candidate is Hillary Clinton. 8.4 million Americans have come out to support her for president. That’s 2.5 million more than Senator Sanders and hundreds of thousands more than Donald Trump. So she has the most enthusiastic voter based of any candidate.”
BANFIELD: “OK, so big smiles, and listen, I’m going to ask you the same thing I asked you yesterday, will you come back?”
SCHAKE: “Of course. Yes.”
BANFIELD: “So we’ll keep those smiles remain.”
SCHAKE: “Yes.”
BANFIELD: “Kristina Schake, thanks for coming in. Appreciate it.”
SCHAKE: “Yes, thank you.”