Muddying the waters
When Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn lost his North Carolina District 11 seat in Congress in the 2022 primary, he had help from Democrats. Republican voters may have found Cawthorn embarassing in the extreme, but many Democrats loathed the young extremist. Enough loathed him that they switched their registrations to unaffiliated so they could choose a Republican ballot and vote against him in the primary. Plenty of real unaffiliated voters who lean left chose to vote in the GOP primary as well.
Both could prove a problem for Democratic campaigns in 2024.
“I’m not a Republican,” wrote Theodore R. Johnson last week in the Washington Post, “but I’ll play one on Super Tuesday, March 5.” Johnson live in Virginia where an open primary allows voters registered nonpartisan to participate.
“I always cast my ballot in whichever primary is more competitive,” he explains. “In 2016, it was the Republicans’; in 2020, the Democrats’. The one constant is that deciding whose box to check is hard.”
That choice will be harder for him in 2024. The GOP presidential field is a basket of undesirables, “a master class in making a comically complex decision tragically complicated.”
Johnson elaborates:
With politics like these, it’s little surprise that most of the country avoids primary elections altogether by simply choosing not to vote. Those who do vote in general elections often stick to partisan lines that track through a tangle of cultural, ideological and social markers. Parties make the choosing easier.
But there is such a thing as too easy. The current state of our two-party system increasingly causes voters to view one of the two as tolerable and the other as a threat. It reduces complicated issues to simplistic battles of good vs. evil, us vs. them. That makes the choice quite straightforward: Vote for your side (the good guys) and against the side filled with bad people and their bad ideas. Even independents have picked a team, effectively partisans without the membership card. The simplicity of it all is a feature, not a bug. And it’s terrible for democracy. Some things, including political decisions, are supposed to be a little bit hard.
Johnson explains his thinking process without explicitly suggesting he’ll vote in the GOP primary to promote the Republican most likely to lose in November 2024.
For those unversed in how Democrats target voters for persuasion and turnout efforts, unaffiliated voters who “date around” and Democrats like those who switched to vote against Madison Cawthorn muddy the targeting waters.
In states where unaffiliated voters may vote in party primaries, choosing a Democratic ballot in a primary suggests to campaigns that an unaffiliated voter leans left and goes on the list for persuasion and turnout contacts. So left-leaning independents who vote in the GOP primary look like right-leaning independents. It lowers their Democratic support scores. That’s a problem for Democrats needing unaffiliated voters to reach a 50%+1 win margin:
Independents (UNAffiliated voters in NC) are the largest bloc of registered voters in NC: 36% (2.6 million voters). But statewide they voted against Democrats here 58% of the time in the last two elections. Democrats cannot win without them, but their traditional tactics, as [David] Pepper recognizes, focuses only on “the most frequent voters.” This tactic leaves many “removed from the political conversation” in what I’ve dubbed “No Voter’s Land.” These are voters campaigns are reluctant to contact (using the tactics of the last war, you might say) because computer scoring deems them not good bets.
In a sense, Democrats believes low-scoring UNAs are (in Seinfeld terms) not sponge-worthy. It’s not that they won’t vote with Democrats, it’s that Democrats lack the data to give them confidence that they might, so they cautiously avoid them.
Oh yes, in 2020 only roughly 17% of NC’s registered unaffiliated voters bothered to vote in the Democratic primary. In 2022, it was only 5.4%. If Democratic campaigns are relying on primary voting to steer them toward friendly independents in 2024, they’ve got a problem.