As Eli mentioned yesterday, voter turnout in King County and throughout much of the rest of the state has thus far been rather low compared to Secretary of State Sam Reed's prediction of a robust 46 percent primary election turnout. But it's maybe not quite as low it looks.

As of yesterday, King County unofficially reported that 18.56 percent of ballots have been returned and verified. I don't have the historical data in front of me, but I've written extensively on ballot return statistics in the past, and generally about half the ballots ultimately cast (give or take) are returned and verified by the end of the Monday prior to election day. Historically, the two biggest ballot return days by far are Tuesday and Wednesday, in that order. All elections are different, and I've mostly looked at stats from general elections, so it's risky to extrapolate, but my guess is that King County turnout ends up falling in the 35 to 40 percent range, maybe 42 percent, tops. Short of predictions, but not exactly an outlier.

As to how this will impact the outcome, I think it's fair to say that generally, the lower the turnout the more it favors Republicans, as their base tends to vote more reliably than the Democrats'. The general and the primary have two different electorates, so beware of picking apart the primary election results as a haruspicy of things to come.

I will however hazard a prediction of sorts in one race, WA-01: Very low turnout could favor Darcy Burner, who has always polled strongest with the most reliable Democratic primary voters, those who are least likely to be swayed by Suzan DelBene's $2.3 million TV advertising campaign. It's hard to imagine Burner surviving DelBene's huge money advantage, but very low turnout is one scenario. That said, I'm not predicting very low turnout, so I guess Burner will just have to hope that DelBene's barrage of ads irritated more late voters than they won over.