Not just in general
The Bulwark has a post up about Democrats believing the key to winning is increasing voter turnout. It’s claims such as “Texas isn’t red or blue; it’s a non-voting state.”
Laura Egan obviously concurs, citing data from David Schor, Nate Cohn, and David Wasserman that shows instead that increasing voter turnout harms Democrats:
The party’s commitment to this idea has even perplexed Republicans. In a 2022 interview, former Texas GOP chair Steve Munisteri told Texas Monthly that Democrats were misunderstanding the partisan allegiance of unregistered voters and argued that they were investing too heavily in voter registration. “They just don’t understand the numbers or haven’t done the research,” he said.
In another quote, Lakshya Jain, political analyst at Split Ticket, an election-modeling and data-analysis group tells Egan, “Election after election proves that this idea of high turnout being the key to Democratic wins is completely wrongheaded. The lean of low-propensity voters in states like Texas, etc.—they are all pretty Republican.”
I don’t have time this morning to address the “nonvoting state” theory in detail. But while I won’t dispute findings referenced above that increasing voter turnout in general harms Democrats, those experts are talking about average turnout across the board. The key is to know where to increase turnout. I’ve addressed the weakness in Democrats’ voter targeting theory before.
Half the time when I log into their national database, VoteBuilder, a familiar deep voice in my head says, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.” Democrats over rely on what comes out of a computer because it comes out of a computer. I was an engineer; I’m skeptical. You’d better be looking at the right data and know how to interpret what the computer is spitting out … and not spitting out. VoteBuilder was developed and deployed in my state decades ago to help turn out Democrats when the registration breakdown was D: 48%, R: 34%, and Unaffiliated 18%. Today in North Carolina it’s D: 30%, R: 30% and UNA: 39%.
Democrats are still using a tool developed a long time ago in a political galaxy far, far away in one that has turned on its head. And using that tool the way they always use it, in our seven largest and bluest counties, Democrats are leaving tens of thousands of independent votes on the table, I believe, because their targeting tool (and the way they are taught to use it) does not see them, and because Democrats don’t even ask them to vote. It’s not enough to flip the state blue, but enough to avoid nail biters that took down Cheri Beasley in 2022 and plagued Allison Riggs in 2024. The reasons are technical and, as much as any other reason, involve a party culture highly resistant to change.
Egan writes, “low-propensity voters have tuned out of politics for a reason. If Democrats want to build lasting majorities, they need to more seriously engage with why.” I posit that one reason is that they are not engaging them at all. And one reason doesn’t involve messaging or policy. In “The Experience of Grassroots Leaders Working with the Democratic Party,” one complaint stands out: A majority of respondents said the party does a terrible job targeting voters, saying that its lists are far too narrow. I have the receipts.