“Great, kid! Don’t get cocky,” space smuggler Han Solo tells young Luke Skywalker.
A tweet this morning (image above) reminds me just how cocky well-researched, “well-informed” voters have no right to be.
An endless array of liberal groups will be on the streets this year urging people to vote. State and federal legislative caucuses. The state party. The governor. Every candidate. MoveOn, VoteVets, NAACP, Voto Latino, Swing Left, Indivisible, the League of Women Voters, EMILY’s List, OFA, DFA, and a dozen other groups will be out working on getting people to the polls.
“Democrats win when the voter turnout is high,” Bernie Sanders told “Face the Nation” in 2016. That’s gospel, but it’s not true, as Dave Weigel observed after the 2020 election saw the highest voter turnout since 1908:
This election debunked a story Democrats had told themselves for decades: that when more voters turn out, they win. When they saw turnout spiking, even in Republican-friendly areas, they assumed that the low-propensity voters heading to the polls were theirs. Sanders repeated it in most of his campaign speeches: “Democrats win when the voter turnout is high,” and “Republicans win when the voter turnout is low.” Beto O’Rourke said it throughout his 2018 campaign for the Senate, premised his brief presidential campaign on it, and returned to it when urging Democrats to spend money to turn Texas blue.
It’s bullshit.
There was record turnout here in North Carolina in 2020. Yet, Republicans turned out at a higher rate than Democrats. Joe Biden lost here by 1.3 points. Nevertheless, Gov. Roy Cooper (D) won reelection by 4.5 points. Perhaps because there are more registered Democrats in the state and perhaps because his Republican challenger was, um, challenged. But many Democrats farther down the ballot lost.
Getting people to the polls is not enough. What cocky, “well-informed” voters do with their ballots when they get there is critical. Too often, their well-informedness is limited to the marquee races, as it is even more so for the less-engaged.
Former state supreme court chief justice Cheri Beasley lost her reelection race in 2020 by 401 votes out of 5.5 million cast. She did not lose because more Democrats did not go to the polls. She lost because over 130,000 North Carolina voters who did go to the polls, did cast ballots, voted for president and did not vote in Beasley’s down-ballot race. 130,000-plus.
Beasley is now running for U.S. Senate.
The raft of party and independent groups above focus their redundant efforts on getting left-leaning voters off their couches, out their doors, and to the polls. What gets missed when local party committees lack get-out-the-vote programs to electioneer at early voting stations is just what their voters do with their ballots once inside the voting booth. Voters need smiling faces reminding them before they walk in that Democrats farther down and on the back of their ballots need their support too. They need sample ballots or slate cards to remind them who is who:
Even many “informed” voters stop dead in their tracks when asked if they know about down-ballot, school board or other nonpartisan races. Yes, we want voters more engaged than that, but the fact is voters dashing in to vote between work, the grocery store, and home are simply looking for reassurance before voting for candidates they don’t know. Or they won’t.
This is especially important to Democrats running down-ballot in rural areas where county committees often lack the training and resources to mount these efforts all through early voting. Two-thirds of the vote took place early in 2020.* Two-thirds of that nationwide was by-mail driven by Covid, but that pattern may not repeat in 2022. In-person early voting will be back. Party training still treats elections as if they are precinct-focused, one-day, 14-hour marathons. That turnout model has not been operative for two decades.
Don’t get cocky.
*Early voting by all methods was over 80% in N.C. Two-thirds of early voting was in-person.
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