The Democratic Party has lost so much ground in voter registration that it has a genuine crisis. But that crisis is compounded by a greater one. The party can no longer do non-partisan registration in a cost-effective way. As an old ACORN hand, I can help explain this a little bit.
When I worked at ACORN it really was funded by George Soros through Project Vote. He wanted to help the Democrats win elections and knew that nonpartisan voter registration would help. Project Vote could not legally run a registration program that was aligned with Democrats, and they had to turn in all registration forms regardless of which party the new voter registered with. But Soros’ investment still made sense.
In fact, it was my job to make it work. I analyzed precinct data and found precincts where the Democrats had won at least 65 percent of the vote in the prior election. Anything less than 65 percent wasn’t considered cost-effective. Think about it. If I pay a worker to register 10 voters and only six of them turn out to be Democrats, then I’ve only netted two votes. In a bad sample, I might have even cost the Democrats two votes or made no difference at all.
As you might expect, the places where Democrats win by 65 percent or more usually have large Black and Latino populations. The only strongly Democratic precincts that lack big minority populations are found in college towns. So, my job was basically to run non-partisan voter registration drives in Black and Latino neighborhoods. We didn’t ask how people would vote or tell them which party to register with, but we reliably got a lot more Democratic registrations and the Republican ones because Black and Latino voters strongly preferred the Democrats.
There were other organizations that focused on registering young voters. They’d typically pick concerts to do registration drives, and they knew young people would skew heavily to the Democrats, so this was cost effective work.
The problem the Democrats have now is that their advantage with Latinos and young people has eroded to the point that these tactics won’t work. They’ve lost ground with Blacks too, but it’s still cost effective to do nonpartisan registration in many black neighborhoods.
Even in 2004, when I was managing Project Vote in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, we had about two dozen precincts to work with. I went over each three times for voter reg and twice for GOTV. But more and more precincts are falling under that magic 65 percent number, and it probably has reached the point where there just isn’t much to pull out through this method.
Another factor is that irrespective of race or neighborhood, it used to be a good bet that non-voters skewed to the left. That’s no longer the case. Low propensity voters skew in Trump’s direction, not vice-versa. So maximizing voter participation isn’t a winner for the Democrats anymore.
What all this means is that the old methods won’t work and may even backfire. What the Democrats have to do is be much more targeted and intentional, which is much more expensive. It also doesn’t fit with non-partisan work, which makes it complicated to finance.
The left is kind of fucked, but I will say that one positive that could come out of this is that the party bigwigs realize that the way to get working class voters of all races back is to represent their interests first and foremost.
