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It’s the turnout, stupid

The war of attrition against an imperial presidency has voters worn down.

“It’s been three years,” Gayle Easterly of Derry, New Hampshire tells the New York Times. “I’m trying to motivate and not to throw up my hands. But I’m emotionally exhausted.”

Join the club. But will it matter in November?

Turnout for the Iowa caucuses fell short of both expectations and hopes. Less than three percent more attended than in 2016. The historic “blue wave” of voting in 2018 gave Democrats control of the House of Representatives and helped them cinch two races for governors in red states. Could that surge be receding?

Well, 2018 was the first mid-term election after Trump’s unlikely 2016 win, and Iowa is a Byzantine, one-night affair in the middle of winter in the 31st most populous state. The two are not remotely comparable. While Democrats have congratulated themselves that their presidential field is an embarrassment of riches, it may also represent the paradox of choice: offer too many and decision-making gets harder.

“I’m going to lay it at the feet of this arcane caucus process,” former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe explained. “People just don’t have the time to do what needs to be done.” Or that embarrassment of riches could itself be a drag:

Others cited the large number of undecided voters in Iowa, saying that as the race narrowed, larger numbers of Democrats would get engaged. In the run-up to the caucuses, polling showed that as many as 40 percent of voters said they had not made a final decision on a candidate. At primary events, voters frequently say they’d support any of the candidates over Mr. Trump, underscoring that their attention is far more focused on the president than on their own options for a nominee.

Or the truly undecided might simply stay home until their vote is a civic duty and carries legal weight.

Megan Suhr, former chair of the Marion County Democrats, wasn’t surprised by the turnout. She told Iowa Starting Line:

“There were a lot of different reasons and explanations,” Suhr said. “There were also a lot of people who said they’d been watching all the hearings and they were watching the trial, and to them, whoever the caucus-goers decided, whoever came out of the primaries, was who they were going to support in the fall.”

Ed Kilgore is still worried. New Hampshire has lowered turnout predictions for it primary from 500,000 to 425,000:

That would still represent the highest turnout level ever in an election involving an incumbent president. But it does not reflect the vision many once had of Democrats and independents and ex-Republicans mobbing the polls to choose a champion to drive the evil king from the throne in Washington. Given how excited the MAGA hordes seem to be, that needs to change — if not during the primaries, then in November.

Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of Virginia’s Christopher Newport University believes politics has moved on while conventional wisdom has not. Bitecofer’s prediction for Democrats’ pickups in 2018 were dead on and made in the summer: 42. As polls shifted, her model did not. Bitecofer believes Democrats have a lock on the presidency in 2020, are likely to pick up House seats, and have a shot at winning a Senate majority in November. The old assumptions about wooing swing voters has not held since at least 2010:

According to any conventional theory of politics, that wave made no sense. Two years prior the GOP had run the economy into the ground; under a Democratic president and a fully Democratic Congress, the economy had stopped its slide and begun to recover. How could the Democrats lose 63 seats in a brutal shellacking two years after totally routing the Republicans?

The prevailing analysis was that Democrats had overreached on policy: After Obamacare, the stimulus, the bank and auto bailouts, the center just revolted. But when Americans picked a president in 2012, they didn’t seem so appalled; Obama won again. The 2014 midterms confounded the polls; the generic ballot heading into Election Day had the two parties basically tied in the national generic ballot, but when the votes came in, the Republicans added seats to their House majority and routed the Democrats in the Senate, picking up nine seats.

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When 2018 rolled around, she saw what was coming: “College educated white men, and especially college educated white women,” she said, “were going to be on fucking fire.”

It didn’t matter who was running; it mattered who was voting. 

I’ve been saying about the Democratic primary, don’t pick a candidate based on whom you think your neighbors might accept. Ask for whom you would knock doors in the heat of August. It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the turnout.

For down-ballot races, especially for local ones, winning is not simply which top-of-ticket candidate has the longest coattails. It is which campaign organization has the chops to deliver votes for down-ballot races many voters simply skip. (It’s why Republicans have worked to eliminate straight-ticket voting.) Political campaigns are not just contests of ideas. Nor are they limited to candidates’ curb-appeal. They are contests of skills.

While Democrats across the country got their clocks cleaned in 2014 and spent months licking their wounds, Democrats here celebrated. Why?

One answer lies below.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

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