source: U.S. News
Failing to get voters to the polls could prove costly for Democrats ... again
What’s the Democrats’ biggest problem this year? President Barack Obama’s upside down approval ratings? The Republicans’ determination to focus the contest on the consistently unpopular (though still more favored than the GOP) Affordable Care Act? No, the Democrats biggest problem in the fall is … Democratic voters.
Obama’s surprisingly solid victory over Mitt Romney – along with the fact that Democrats have won a plurality of the presidential vote in five of the last six elections – spurred buzz that the GOP seems to have ceded to the Democrats chunks of the electorate that will play an increasingly important role in coming contests. The president beat Romney by 11 points among women, by 24 points among voters 24 and under, by 44 points among Hispanics and by 87 points among black voters, all while losing whites and senior citizens by double-digit margins.
But midterm America is a different animal than presidential America, and Democrats have to deal with the downside of their successful presidential coalition. Specifically, the parts of the Democratic base that are so important in presidential contests – especially unmarried women, young voters and minorities, or the “rising American electorate,” as pollsters call them – just don’t turn out without a presidential top of the ticket.
“It’s very clear that our most significant challenge is not the Koch Brothers, not ACA, but turnout,” says the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s Justin Barasky. As Obama told Democratic donors last week: “We have this congenital disease, which is in midterm elections we don’t vote at the same rates.”
A Democracy Corps poll of 2012 voters underscored the Democrats’ problem. While 72 percent of voters surveyed overall said they were “almost certain” to vote, that figure dropped to 64 percent among the rising American electorate and climbed to 79 percent of those outside that group. And while Democrats are in a statistical dead heat with the GOP on the generic congressional ballot – if the election were held today which party would you vote for? – they have an impressive 49-33 lead among those voters who cast ballots in 2012 but are likely to stay home in 2014. There’s a problem and an opportunity here, according to Democracy Corps’ Erica Seifert. The former is that “right now it does look a lot like 2010 among the rising American electorate. The opportunity is that unlike Republicans, Democrats have a lot of votes left on the table.”
Overall, while the rising American electorate made up 47.5 percent of those who voted in 2012, thanks to drop-offs it is expected to comprise less than 43 percent this November, according to the Voter Participation Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that focuses on increasing the share of historically underrepresented voting groups. That’s nearly 22 million fewer voters. It’s scarcely an exaggeration to say that different countries sandwiched a pair of Obama victories around a historical drubbing of the Democrats by the GOP.
And this turnout roller coaster isn’t atypical. From 1964 to 2008, voter turnout fell 14 percent from presidential to nonpresidential years, according to the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Thomas Schaller. And that dropoff comes from Democratic-leaning voters: Since 1992, voters under 45 have made up 48.6 percent of the House electorate in presidential years, but only 39.8 percent in midterms, according to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman. Similarly, over the last dozen years the nonwhite portion of the congressional electorate has been 25.6 percent in presidential years and 20.6 percent in nonpresidential years, according to Wasserman’s stats.
So what to do? “With respect to motivating people to come out to the polls, you have to have two pieces in the strategy,” according to Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a former House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman. “One, you have to have a message that resonates with those voters and, second, you need to deliver that message to where the voters are.”
For Democrats, the message is focusing on middle-class pocketbook issues that especially resonate with the drop-off voters, like pay equity this week and the ongoing push to raise the minimum wage: Women make up two-thirds of all minimum wage workers in the country. The Democracy Corps poll released this week found that the issues that most ginned up intensity with unmarried women, for example, were the combination of pay equity and equal health insurance (think, too, of the GOP’s monomaniacal obsession with repealing Obamacare).
The other prong is ensuring that message gets to the right people. That’s why Democrats are investing in what Barasky calls “the largest, data-driven turnout operation Senate races have ever seen.” The committee plans to spend $60 million on its turnout effort, called the “Bannock Street Project.” By comparison that’s nearly nine times the $7 million the committee spent on turnout in 2010 (when, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, the committee invested heavily in television ads) and more than twice the amount it spent two years ago.
It’s an unprecedented attempt to fix the Democrats’ midterm turnout problem using the sophisticated data-mining and targeting techniques made famous by the Obama campaign two years ago.
Time will tell whether it will prove to be money well spent. Even if Democrats can fix their midterm problem, they’re defending seats in red states and face tough head winds in the sixth year of a presidency. But if nothing else, give Democrats credit for identifying their biggest problem and tackling it head on.
Failing to get voters to the polls could prove costly for Democrats ... again
What’s the Democrats’ biggest problem this year? President Barack Obama’s upside down approval ratings? The Republicans’ determination to focus the contest on the consistently unpopular (though still more favored than the GOP) Affordable Care Act? No, the Democrats biggest problem in the fall is … Democratic voters.
Obama’s surprisingly solid victory over Mitt Romney – along with the fact that Democrats have won a plurality of the presidential vote in five of the last six elections – spurred buzz that the GOP seems to have ceded to the Democrats chunks of the electorate that will play an increasingly important role in coming contests. The president beat Romney by 11 points among women, by 24 points among voters 24 and under, by 44 points among Hispanics and by 87 points among black voters, all while losing whites and senior citizens by double-digit margins.
But midterm America is a different animal than presidential America, and Democrats have to deal with the downside of their successful presidential coalition. Specifically, the parts of the Democratic base that are so important in presidential contests – especially unmarried women, young voters and minorities, or the “rising American electorate,” as pollsters call them – just don’t turn out without a presidential top of the ticket.
“It’s very clear that our most significant challenge is not the Koch Brothers, not ACA, but turnout,” says the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s Justin Barasky. As Obama told Democratic donors last week: “We have this congenital disease, which is in midterm elections we don’t vote at the same rates.”
A Democracy Corps poll of 2012 voters underscored the Democrats’ problem. While 72 percent of voters surveyed overall said they were “almost certain” to vote, that figure dropped to 64 percent among the rising American electorate and climbed to 79 percent of those outside that group. And while Democrats are in a statistical dead heat with the GOP on the generic congressional ballot – if the election were held today which party would you vote for? – they have an impressive 49-33 lead among those voters who cast ballots in 2012 but are likely to stay home in 2014. There’s a problem and an opportunity here, according to Democracy Corps’ Erica Seifert. The former is that “right now it does look a lot like 2010 among the rising American electorate. The opportunity is that unlike Republicans, Democrats have a lot of votes left on the table.”
Overall, while the rising American electorate made up 47.5 percent of those who voted in 2012, thanks to drop-offs it is expected to comprise less than 43 percent this November, according to the Voter Participation Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that focuses on increasing the share of historically underrepresented voting groups. That’s nearly 22 million fewer voters. It’s scarcely an exaggeration to say that different countries sandwiched a pair of Obama victories around a historical drubbing of the Democrats by the GOP.
And this turnout roller coaster isn’t atypical. From 1964 to 2008, voter turnout fell 14 percent from presidential to nonpresidential years, according to the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Thomas Schaller. And that dropoff comes from Democratic-leaning voters: Since 1992, voters under 45 have made up 48.6 percent of the House electorate in presidential years, but only 39.8 percent in midterms, according to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman. Similarly, over the last dozen years the nonwhite portion of the congressional electorate has been 25.6 percent in presidential years and 20.6 percent in nonpresidential years, according to Wasserman’s stats.
So what to do? “With respect to motivating people to come out to the polls, you have to have two pieces in the strategy,” according to Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a former House Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman. “One, you have to have a message that resonates with those voters and, second, you need to deliver that message to where the voters are.”
For Democrats, the message is focusing on middle-class pocketbook issues that especially resonate with the drop-off voters, like pay equity this week and the ongoing push to raise the minimum wage: Women make up two-thirds of all minimum wage workers in the country. The Democracy Corps poll released this week found that the issues that most ginned up intensity with unmarried women, for example, were the combination of pay equity and equal health insurance (think, too, of the GOP’s monomaniacal obsession with repealing Obamacare).
The other prong is ensuring that message gets to the right people. That’s why Democrats are investing in what Barasky calls “the largest, data-driven turnout operation Senate races have ever seen.” The committee plans to spend $60 million on its turnout effort, called the “Bannock Street Project.” By comparison that’s nearly nine times the $7 million the committee spent on turnout in 2010 (when, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, the committee invested heavily in television ads) and more than twice the amount it spent two years ago.
It’s an unprecedented attempt to fix the Democrats’ midterm turnout problem using the sophisticated data-mining and targeting techniques made famous by the Obama campaign two years ago.
Time will tell whether it will prove to be money well spent. Even if Democrats can fix their midterm problem, they’re defending seats in red states and face tough head winds in the sixth year of a presidency. But if nothing else, give Democrats credit for identifying their biggest problem and tackling it head on.
