Gramnesty needed 50% +1 vote to win outright tonight and avoid a runoff, which he did. Even if all the votes of every one of his challengers had gone to just one challenger, Gramnesty still would have received over 50% of the vote and won outright.
Is there a single instance when 6 (or more) candidates ran against an incumbent in a primary and forced a runoff?
True, but having so many candidates really dilutes the message that someone would be a viable and appropriate alternative to Graham...instead he just dominated the race and the rest of the candidates were just background noise because there were so many of them...and with the nearest challenger having 14% apparently none of them were very organized at all. It’s a shame...out of all of the incumbents that it would have been beneficial to defeat, this guy would have been the most beneficial to replace. Oh well...