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.
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.
Do you read Rachel Bitecofer at all? Just wondering what you think of her analysis. Seems to contradict what you are saying… http://cnu.edu/wasoncenter/2019/07/01-2020-election-forecast/
Also this… https://www.salon.com/2019/08/17/this-political-scientist-completely-nailed-the-2018-blue-wave-heres-her-2020-forecast/
I would also be interested to hear Booman’s thoughts on this. He seems to disagree, and it would be informative to hear why.
I’ll be interested to see what “the center” is in 2020. Particularly if there’s relatively high voter turnout among those under 40, the “center” next year *could* be noticeably different than it was in 2016 or earlier. Part of that is due to demographic change, and part is due to the reaction against the hard-right, anti-majoritarian turn taken by the Republican party over the past decade (of which Trump is only the most glaring example).
Well, since every Dem in the race is currently painted as a “socialist!”, the National Trumpalists aren’t going to be reliably distinguishing what constitutes the center. Nor will the hapless overly-worked refs, the useless corporate media. As soon as the Biden/Klobuchar ticket is endorsed, its “socialism” will be decried, haha!
That’s the missing piece of the puzzle. Extremely bright lefties delude themselves into believing that it’s easier for the media to paint an actually leftie candidate as a CRAZED SOCIALIST than for them to do the same with a centrist candidate. They keep insisting that facts matter in political campaigns. It would be adorable if it weren’t so dangerous.
JOHN KERRY, WAR CRIMINAL. HILLARY CLINTON, SEX TRAFFICER.
I think democrats are all socialists from Trump’s vantage point. So when/if Biden is nominated he will call him a left wing socialist, no doubt. So it might be better to fashion the platform with an eye to high turnout with programs to benefit democratic or independent groups, progressive or not. Since it is still early in the process, I also would not water down the rhetoric just yet, if ever. I am not at all sure many would be turned off by M4A or educational help or many other such proposals. Hell man, too many have gone bankrupt or even died at the hands of the Neanderthals. It might help with many democratic groups.
I am also not sure who you think you can pick off from the MAGA crowd in the rural communities. They have sold out long ago and have been there, some of them, for generations. I see them all the time on tv saying stupid shit. Now if one finds an audience that may actually listen, have at it. But I haven’t a clue where that is.
Dispassionately, your analysis makes perfect sense but when you write things like this:
“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.”
I kind of lose my interest in reading much further.
You write as if the things we stand for on the Left are simply another side and that all politics is a game theory to be played out like a computer model. I mean, climate change is not arguable. Neither is health care for all. That’s just to name a few.
What the hell is the point of people working to advance OUR interests to survive climate change or avoid going bankrupt from healthcare emergencies when, as you seem to see it, the only thing that matters is this political game theory you constantly advance.
It’s god damn frustrating reading you some times – and you are one of the best actually writing on this country’s political dynamics!
Thanks for your comment. It brought to mind one of Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
I think it underlies some of what Martin is getting at/worried about regarding persuadable voters in next year’s election. Given the demographic and political changes since 2016, it’s entirely likely that the Democratic candidate will have to win a popular vote margin of 5 million or more in order to overcome the Republican lean of the electoral college vote. That’s a lot of people—affluent white suburbanites who like their capital gains, rural and small-town whites in the upper Midwest who’ve started voting like their Southern counterparts, Latinos in the South and Southwest who aren’t used to voting in large numbers and who don’t always feel welcomed by the Democratic establishment—who aren’t used to voting for Democratic presidential candidates.
Whoever the nominee is will have to create some level of comfort with many of those voters so that those voters will 1) vote, and 2) vote Democratic.
“But this won’t get him to parity, so he’ll have to paint the Democrat as unacceptable to centrist voters.” To me, any voter who would even consider voting for Trump is by definition not a “centrist” voter. Any centrist voter worthy of the name would already consider Trump utterly unacceptable, no matter who is running as the Democrat. To vote for Trump, a person has to either be aware of how bad he is, and simply not care, or be the kind of person who believes Tucker Carlson on Fox when he says that Bolton is a leftist. That is, either immoral or easily duped. There is nothing any Democratic candidate can do to win their votes.
Exactly. Who is the target market for the centrist candidate of 2020? That (very small) slice of The 46% who now kinda/sorta regret their vote, but are more afraid of the idealism of the Green New Deal or Medicare for All than 4 more years of fascism led by a deranged imbecile? Those last-minute Hillarians who voted for her against Der Trumper, but now cannot support that terrifying “socialist”, Warren? Talk about a low common denominator. As for the now-swinging suburban voter, how many are going to have actually voted Dem in 2018, but conclude that the Dem prez nominee is so extreme that Der Trumper is really the “safer” choice in 2020? What kind of a spluttering, lose-the-forest-for-the-trees mind would that be?
And who knows what precisely would be a bridge too far for such folks? By definition, they are looking for ANYTHING to hang their hat on as to why the Dem candidate is “too lib’rul!” It’s likely that a single progressive ideal stated by the Dem anywhere in the past 3 years will be more than enough for any (bad faith) voter who (today) is really “undecided” whether Der Trumper should be awarded another 4 years.
Personality is going to matter a lot this cycle. Any Dem candidate is way to the left of Hair Hitler. Finding the person this cycle who can evoke some of that old Obama ’08 magic where people can see themselves reflected is going to be key.