Donald Trump likes to say he has created a political movement that has drawn “millions and millions” of new voters into the Republican Party. “It’s the biggest thing happening in politics,” Trump has said. “All over the world, they’re talking about it,” he's bragged.

But a Politico analysis of the early 2016 voting data show that, so far, it’s just not true.


While Trump’s insurgent candidacy has spurred record-setting Republican primary turnout in state after state, the early statistics show that the vast majority of those voters aren’t actually new to voting or to the Republican Party, but rather they are reliable past voters in general elections. They are only casting ballots in a Republican primary for the first time.

It is a distinction with profound consequences for the fall campaign.

If Trump isn’t bringing the promised wave of new voters into the GOP, it’s far less likely the Manhattan businessman can transform a 2016 Electoral College map that begins tilted against the Republican Party. And whether Trump’s voters are truly new is a question of urgent interest both to GOP operatives and Hillary Clinton and her allies, who have dispatched their top analytics experts to find the answer.

“All he seems to have done is bring new people into the primary process, not bring new people into the general-election process … It’s exciting that these new people that are engaged in the primary but those people are people that are already going to vote Republican in the [fall],” said Alex Lundry, who served as director of data science for Mitt Romney in 2012, when presented Politico’s findings. “It confirms what my suspicion has been all along.”

For this analysis, Politico obtained voting statistics from GOP officials and independent analysts in the handful of states that have so far released such information. To varying extents, the findings rebut both of Trump’s central claims: that he has brought in waves of new voters and that he has attracted flocks of Democrats. Among the highlights:

In Iowa, the Republican caucus turnout smashed its past record by 50 percent this year, jumping from 121,000 to nearly 187,000. But, according to figures provided by the state party, 95 percent of the 2016 caucusgoers had previously voted in at least one of the past four presidential elections—and almost 80 percent had voted in at least three of the past four.

The new caucusgoers, in other words, are likely to vote in November anyway.

In South Carolina, which also saw record turnout, data from the state GOP show that first-time voters amounted to 8.4 percent of the GOP electorate. But triple that amount—roughly 25 percent—were only first-time voters in a Republican primary. Even with historically high turnout, the data from the state party show that the Trump-led ballot brought almost exactly the same number of former Democratic primary voters into this year’s GOP primary as a Trump-free ballot did four years ago.

And in Florida, one of the nation’s most critical battleground states, Republican primary turnout jumped by 40 percent from 2012 to 2016. But only 6 percent of those who voted in the 2016 Republican primary did not vote in either of the 2012 or 2014 general elections and were registered to vote then. That amounts to a lot of people—about 142,000—but it’s a fractional share of a populous and fast-growing state that has added almost 1 million voters to the rolls since the beginning of 2012.

Certainly, in a tight race—Florida was decided by 537 votes in 2000—Trump’s new voters could prove significant, even decisive. But they are not suggestive of a candidate wholly remaking the composition of the electorate or reshaping the entire political landscape.

“There is no question he brought some people out but relatively speaking it’s not a huge number when it comes to a general election,” said Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida who has studied voter turnout patterns and who calculated the Florida figures for Politico.

It’s difficult to quantify exactly what share of the inflated 2016 primary turnout is inspired by Trump. Many states have yet to release detailed data and even among those that have a patchwork of different voting rules, the fact that some new young voters register every cycle and the notion that many Republicans could have turned out to oppose Trump—remember, he began winning a clear majority in states only recently—make such calculations nearly impossible.

But the data so far point away from a massive movement of new voters or Democrats flocking to Trump.

“I think the glass is half full,” Smith added, looking at the numbers from Trump’s perspective. “But it’s a small glass — maybe a shot glass.”

***

Any way it’s sliced, the historic primary turnout of 2016 is good news for the GOP. It is a sign, as it was for Democrats in 2008 when the Clinton-Obama contest shattered old turnout records, of energy and enthusiasm that can often be translated into volunteer hours and campaign cash. And Democrats this year, despite the surprisingly close contest between Clinton and Bernie Sanders, are far below their previous turnout highs—raising the specter of a problematic enthusiasm gap this fall.

“The Republicans have tremendous energy. The Democrats don’t,” Trump bragged at Mar-a-Lago as the primary results rolled in on March 1, Super Tuesday. “They don’t have any energy. Their numbers are down. Our numbers are through the roof.”

Trump is right about the numbers. But his conclusion—that he’ll thus win in November—is historically unfounded. Experts who study voting presidential patterns warn that inflated primary turnout and general election outcomes are unrelated.

“It’s very hard to say that anything that happens in the primary season has that much of an impact on the general,” said Drew DeSilver of the Pew Research Center, who has studied presidential voter turnout. Of the past six presidential elections with competitive primaries in both parties, the party with the higher primary turnout has won more votes in the fall only three times, he noted. “There is definitely not a correlation between turnout in the primaries and success in the general election.”

That is largely because primary season vote totals account for only a fraction of what a winning candidate needs in November. So while Trump has amassed a record number of primary votes—even in a 17-candidate field and with big states like California and New Jersey still to vote—his final figure is likely to represent about 1 in 4 of the votes he’ll require in the fall.

Four years ago, President Obama won reelection with 65.9 million votes; Trump has accumulated about 11 million votes so far in the primary.

Still, for many Republicans, Trump’s allure against Clinton is his supposed ability to attract lapsed Democrats, independents and nontraditional Republicans to his side. Trump has argued his anti-trade, immigration hard-liner populist appeal can transform what has been a stable Electoral College map by putting blue-collar states, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, back in the GOP column. He has even touted his chances in solidly Democratic New York.

“I’m gonna win other states that no other Republican candidate can win,” Trump said at a news conference in Washington in March. “That from the Electoral College standpoint ... it makes it a much different deal.”

And the reason is because Trump said he is “creating a larger, stronger party.”

“All you have to do is take a look at the primary states where I’ve won and just look—we’ve gone from X number to a much larger number. That hasn’t happened to the Republican Party in many, many decades. So I think we’re going to be more inclusive. I think we’re going to be more unified and I think we’re going to be a much bigger party, and I think we’re going to win in November,” Trump said on Super Tuesday.

Democrats are dubious.

“I understand the fascination with what’s happening on the Republican side related to expanding the map,” said Guy Cecil, chief strategist for Priorities USA, the pro-Clinton super PAC that has reserved $125 million in ads to help her. “What’s unclear is whether or not these new voters who are participating in the primary are new voters, or are they just new primary voters who usually vote in a general election.”

Priorities USA has tasked Civis Analytics, the Democratic consulting shop founded by Obama’s data team, to ferret out the answer. “A lot of this we’ll see as files are appended and we start seeing who turned out in each state,” Cecil said.

Plus, Cecil added, there is the countervailing Trump effect on Democratic turnout. “The Trump Republican Party has even further alienated a growing electorate among young people, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans,” Cecil said.

But for Republicans it’s already become, more or less, an accepted fact that because of their record 2016 turnout in the primaries that Trump brought in gobs of new Republicans, even if the early data don’t yet verify that.

“I represent a wing of the conservative party, you could say,” Speaker Paul Ryan said after last week’s meeting with Trump. “He is bringing a whole wing to it, new voters that we've never had for decades.”

***

In Ohio, a pivotal battleground that was the second-closest state in 2012, the 2016 primary results offer a mixed bag for Trump.

There were roughly 60,000 new voters in the Ohio Republican primary, for instance. But there were also about 58,000 new voters in the Democratic primary, suggesting those additions amounted to a wash, according to Mike Dawson, an Ohio elections statistics expert.

In what would seem a boon for the GOP, there were 115,000 party switchers in Ohio—voters who had last cast a ballot in a Democratic primary who voted in the 2016 GOP primary—far more than the 35,000 who switched from the GOP to vote in this year’s Democratic contest.

But it’s not clear how much of that switch was to support Trump. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has high approval ratings across party lines, made a significant push to capture Democratic votes, and Kasich won the Ohio primary 46.8 percent to 35.6 percent for Trump.

“While Trump may be bringing in some people, some of them voted for him, some of them may have been motivated to vote against him,” noted Michael McDonald, who runs the United States Elections Project, which tracks voting results.

In addition, Dawson pointed out, the difference in the share of the Ohio electorate that shifted from voting in a Democratic primary to the Republican one was not statistically significant in 2012 and 2016 (4.4 percent and 5.9 percent), even if the total number of party-switchers was larger this year. “I don’t think there’s enough evidence that Trump significantly expanded the electorate in Ohio,” Dawson said.

The vast majority of those record-setting 2.01 million Republican primary voters in Ohio—about 1.85 million of them—had voted in at least one of the past three presidential elections. And of the 156,000 who had not, roughly 50 percent are currently younger than 30—meaning many were simply not of voting age, according to election statistics provided by Ohio Republicans.

Because of Ohio’s voter registration rules—the state doesn’t have voters register with political parties but it does keep track of what primary ballot a voter chooses—just the fact that a record 2 million voters turned out for the primary is advantageous, said Matt Borges, the state GOP chairman.

“I have a million new Republicans to do our data work on and figure out who would and wouldn’t have been in our get-out-the-vote universe,” Borges said. He acknowledged that “a large percentage probably would have been in our GOTV universe anyway,” but said it still represented a political windfall.

“It’s not, ‘Hey, holy cow, we now have a million more Republicans,’” he said. “But we don’t need that. We only lost to Obama by 160,000 votes in 2012.”

***

One of Trump’s favorite states to cite when he makes his party-expanding case has been South Carolina, which he won by 10 points in February.

“We’re taking from the Democrats. We’re taking from the independents. We have a lot more people. We have a lot more people. I mean, take a look at South Carolina,” Trump has said. “Look at the numbers. Look at the numbers from four years ago when nobody even wanted to waste their time and vote. And then you look at—I was there and you had lines that went a mile long. And it was virtually more than doubled.”

It’s true that turnout was up (though not nearly doubled): from about 603,000 to 740,000. But exit polling actually showed a smaller share of Democrats (2 percent versus 4 percent) and independents (22 percent versus 25 percent) who cast GOP ballots in 2016, compared with 2012.

More significantly, the South Carolina GOP statistics show that while the Trump-led ballot helped lure 51,645 voters from the 2008 Democratic primary into the 2016 Republican one, that figure is virtually unchanged from four years earlier, when 51,808 Democratic primary voters in 2008 cast ballots in the 2012 Republican primary.

South Carolina is a solidly Republican state, so any shifts there are far less significant than swing states.

In New Hampshire, a general-election battleground, exit polls showed only 15 percent of GOP primary voters said it was their first time voting in a Republican primary, only a slight bump from the 12 percent four years earlier. And Trump won an almost equal share of the new primary voters, 38 percent, and the old ones, 35 percent.

In Florida, where voters must register with a party to vote in its primary, Smith, the data-crunching political scientist, said that about 8,500 voters changed their registration in the last two weeks from independent to Republican and then voted either early or absentee in the 2016 primary. But that figure during the same period was almost identical for independents who became Democrats: about 7,600. The statistics show that about 2,000 more Democrats reregistered as Republicans during that period than vice versa.

Smith saw some signs of Trump bringing in lapsed voters. He pointed to the fact that 11,400 registered Republican voters whom the state had classified as inactive because they hadn’t voted in so long—“dead wood,” in Smith’s words—came out in this year’s primary, far more than the share of such voters that Democrats reactivated.

“It’s not as big as he thinks and the Republican Party would be quite remiss if they think that would be the difference of new voters coming to the polls,” Smith said of Trump’s impact. “That’s pretty clear.”

Top Democrats and Republicans alike agree that a broader challenge facing the GOP is that the traditional Republican base—older, mostly white voters—already turn out at a higher rate than the Democratic base of minorities and young voters.

“Romney didn’t lose because he didn’t turn out his base. He lost because his base was too small,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama. “He did a really good job turning out Republican voters. There just wasn’t enough of them.”

Lundry, the Romney data guru who served as chief analytics officer for Jeb Bush this cycle, said the GOP math problem is daunting: “We don’t have that many people to activate that are low turnout but high likelihood of being Republicans. The Democrats have orders of magnitude more voters in that group than we do.”

“You win by doing one of two things,” Lundry explained. “You expand the electorate or persuade the existing electorate to support you.”

Trump has talked mostly about broadening the pool of voters. “If the data shows he hasn’t been expanding the electorate, he’s going to have to rely more on persuasion,” Lundry said.

With every state operating under different rules—caucuses vs. primaries, closed primaries vs. open ones, and states with no party registration at all—it is a steep challenge to figure out how many of Trump’s voters are truly new or have switched party loyalty. Factoring in how many new people vote every four years regardless of who is on the ballot, and then figuring out what share of the expanded GOP electorate came out to vote against Trump, make those calculations even more daunting.

And it would be all-but-impossible for Trump, who has publicly dismissed the value of precision analytics. He prefers instead to rely on massive rallies, blanket mass-media coverage and sharp political instincts that helped him crush what many had described as the most talented Republican primary field in a generation.

“If people want to be smart,” Trump has said, “they should embrace this movement."

But the true size of his movement among new general-election voters remains an open question.

“You can say anything,” Smith said of Trump’s boasts. “It doesn’t mean that it’s true.”