Election outcomes have a million authors but it’s still crudely accurate to say that many are decided by differential voter turnout (one party’s base turns out at a higher rate than the other’s) or by persuasion (more nonpartisan/apolitical people choose one side than the other).

There are some basic patterns to how this tends to play out. The party that is out of power tends to be more motivated to vote. For this reason, the president often takes a beating in midterm elections even when they’re fairly popular and cruising to reelection. Another repeating trend is that presidential elections arouse much more public interest than midterms elections and thus reliably have much higher turnout. Higher turnout tends to mute the impact of a differential turnout advantage and heighten the impact of voter persuasion.

The truth is that every vote counts equally (at least, within each state contest), so it’s no better to turn out a partisan Democrat than to persuade an undecided voter to cast his lot with you. But, when you’re forming an electoral strategy, you generally need to emphasize one goal over the other. To do that correctly, you have to know what part of the cycle you’re in.

One way to decide is to look at whether your political base is already self-motivated. If they are, you can spend less time worrying about exciting them and more time worrying about persuading undecideds.  The Democrats are currently out of power, which means their base should be more motivated to vote than Trump’s base. Yet, that alone isn’t necessarily good enough because a presidential election has very turnout and so this advantage is not as influential as it would be in the midterms. The Democrats still want to maximize their turnout, and to assess that factor, you want to look at overall voter interest. According to new polling from CNN voter interest is off the charts:

If we combine the two most enthusiastic categories in CNN’s polling (those who say they’re extremely enthusiastic and those who identify as very enthusiastic), we see that combined enthusiasm has been at or above 70 percent in every poll CNN has conducted this cycle.

(Philip Bump/The Washington Post)
(Philip Bump/The Washington Post)

Only once before has that measure of enthusiasm been at 70 percent: Two weeks before the 2004 election, 70 percent of voters were at least very enthusiastic about voting in it.

In one sense, this isn’t surprising. Turnout for the 2018 midterms was aberrantly high, in some places approaching the level we’d expect in a presidential election. That voter enthusiasm has not waned. And it portends a much higher than usual turnout for the 2020 contest between Trump and the Democratic Party’s eventual nominee.

So, two things we kind of already know is that the Democrats are likely to more motivated to vote in 2020 and that strong partisans on both sides are going to turn out on their own without the need for any special prodding.  When we combine these two things, it makes it look like the only way for the Democrats to lose is if they do a really bad job of persuasion. If they hold the center, even if they only break even in the center, they are almost definitely going to win.  But a holding the center strategy is often irritating and dispiriting for partisans who prefer to highlight ambitious and sometimes controversial goals and have their candidates forcefully speak the truth as they see it, even if that kind of language can alienate people who aren’t particularly political in their outlook.

Partisans will always argue that it is their interests and desires that should be courted and that the election will turn on their enthusiasm alone. The problem is that that is never wholly true, and in some cycles it is actually false. This is one of those cycles.

With unprecedented turnout likely, the election models are not going to have an easy time of identifying likely voters. Actually, they should probably reverse that and seek out the unlikely voters because there will be so few of them. Turnout should be sky-high for Trump’s side too, but he’ll lose a strict turnout battle by default, both because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the unlikely voter pool and because the Democratic base will be more motivated than the Republican one. So, the way for Trump to win is by capturing the undecideds.

He’s actually terrible at this, and he seems incapable of really even trying to win the center. He will first pursue the strategy of dragging every last rural vote out of the woodwork, thereby working on the right-wing side of the unlikely voter pool almost exclusively. But this won’t get him to parity, so he’ll have to paint the Democrat as unacceptable to centrist voters. He will have ammunition at hand to attempt this. For the Democrats, the goal should be to avoid adding to his stockpile.

This is advice that I’d give to any Democrat running against an incumbent Republican president when voter enthusiasm is this high, but with Trump it’s even more critical to capture the center because he’s basically ceded it to the Democrats. If they somehow manage to hand it back, it will be the worst case of political malpractice I’ve ever witnessed.