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Election Update #6: Turnout, Turnout, Turnout

You don’t hear as much about voter turnout as you used to. That’s for a few reasons, but I think they can be best understood by revisiting Bernie Sanders’ 2020 run for President.

At that time, Sanders had revamped his political operation after narrowly losing the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton. He was widely recognized as a major 2020 contender, but he also faced a significant obstacle: the concern that his progressive views made him less likely to defeat Donald Trump than more moderate candidates like Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg. Many anti-Trump voters appeared to believe that the Democratic Party couldn’t afford to gamble on a nontraditional candidate like Sanders.

Sanders responded to this concern by putting forward an interesting argument. He admitted that it was true that some moderate voters might be turned off by his policies. But he claimed that in today’s political climate, there aren’t many moderate voters left: the electorate is so polarized that persuading the tiny fraction on the fence is a fool’s errand. Instead, he said, much larger gains could be made by mobilizing previously unengaged voters. For example, young voters and Hispanic voters—heretofore the demographics with the lowest voting rates—were sure to turn out for him in record totals, growing the Democratic base significantly and dwarfing any losses among centrists.

The media, for the most part, loved this theory. After all, it seemed true. Indeed, the cable news viewers and social media followers who consume political media are highly polarized, and these are the people whom the media hears from most often and attempts to reach. Plus, the theory seemed to offer an explanation for Trump’s underdog victory in 2016: perhaps Clinton had fallen into a trap by trying to persuade nonexistent swing voters, while Trump had been ahead of the game in realizing that firing up one’s base had become more important in today’s politics.

But there was one problem with Sanders’ argument: it didn’t work. The supposedly surefire participation from traditionally low-turnout voters turned out to be a mirage. Although Sanders scored some early primary victories, Klobuchar and Buttigieg soon dropped out, allowing establishment voters to coalesce around Biden, who immediately began running up huge statewide deficits against Sanders—far greater than what Clinton had managed in 2016. There was no other conclusion than that Sanders’ strategy had backfired. He had alienated moderate Democrats while the young and Hispanic voting blocks on which he had staked his campaign continued to sit on the sidelines.

So the theory that contemporary elections are decided based on turnout, not voter persuasion, suffered a major blow. And in the 2020 general election, it suffered another. Because even with Sanders out of the picture, many in the media continued to beat the drum of turnout. For example, they asserted that the key to a Biden victory was to recreate the high turnout in Black communities that Barack Obama had achieved in 2008 and 2012, before it dipped in 2016 with Clinton on the ballot. In the end, though, Biden not only failed to recreate Obama’s nonwhite turnout, but he performed even worse than Clinton in this regard. Yet he still won the election—by winning over, as I’ve written, college-educated White voters from the suburbs.

Why does all this matter? It’s because in 2024, a candidate is once again betting big on high turnout among traditionally low-propensity voters. The candidate this time, though, is Trump.

Traits that increase one’s likelihood of voting in a United States election include being old, white, female, and college-educated. Young people, minorities, men, and non-college educated people are less likely to vote. These latter traits though, characterize the very people who seem to have moved toward Trump in the polls since 2020. As I wrote in Updates #3 and #4, in this cycle Trump has polled better among Black and Hispanic voters than any Republican in decades—particularly with younger members of those demographics and those lacking college degrees. The problem for him, though, is that these voters, compared to other segments of the population, vote at very low levels. Just ask Bernie Sanders.

Trump’s advertising and messaging strategies seem to indicate that he believes he can do what Sanders couldn’t: turn out young men of color who aren’t traditionally engaged politically. And he may not have a choice but to believe this. After all, as I wrote about in Update #2, Democrats have made major gains among college-educated White voters over the past two cycles, and they appear primed to gain yet again. For Trump to weather suburban losses in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, he has two options: 1) increase his margins among non-college Whites (his most favorable demographic), or 2) cut into Democratic margins among voters of color.

He’s certainly tried his best to achieve the former—ramping up his rhetoric on immigration and other culture war topics, such as transgender rights. But polls haven’t necessarily shown that he’s made any headway. This may not be surprising: remember that in 2020, he failed to gain any additional voter share among non-college Whites despite making large gains in 2016 compared to Mitt Romney. Judging by the data, he could simply be maxed out among this demographic. You can only demand a border wall so many times.

Also, non-college Whites comprise a shrinking portion of the electorate. In 2008, they composed 51% of people who voted, a slim majority. In 2020, however, they composed only 44%, ceding ground to Hispanics, Asians, and college-educated Whites. If trends hold, in 2024, they’ll be down to a 42% share.

This poses a significant problem for Trump if he seeks to lean on this demographic to make gains relative to 2020. Consider that if non-college Whites indeed decline from 44% of voters in 2020 to 42% in 2024, their collective voting influence would drop by about 4% compared to 2020. Thus, for Trump to merely hold steady in absolute vote totals, he would have to perform four points better among this group than he did in 2020—just to make up for their shrinkage as a portion of the whole. Again, the polls currently don’t show that he’s accomplishing that. Adam Carlson’s poll aggregator, for example, referenced in earlier posts, indicates that Trump is, if anything, performing a few points below his 2020 numbers with non-college Whites.

The polls do show, however, that Trump has gained significantly with young voters of color, especially men. Therefore, it’s no surprise that he’s made an aggressive effort to court them even further, appearing on popular Black podcasts and tailoring major ads toward Black voters. But will they show up for him at the polls?

In my opinion, Trump is, at best, playing a dangerous game. There’s a reason that non-voters don’t vote, and it’s usually because they don’t feel that politics truly impacts their lives. If Sanders, whose progressive platform promised to directly benefit voters of color through massive government spending, couldn’t convince them otherwise, how will Trump, whose platform contains hardly any specifics whatsoever?

In my first Update, I speculated that Trump’s apparent gains among voters of color were partly a reflection of recent Democratic headwinds in specific media markets that covered post-pandemic crime as a major threat. Black and Hispanic voters in these areas, disgruntled with what they perceive as Democratic permissiveness toward crime, may indeed shift strongly toward Trump; after all, they did so for House Republicans in the 2022 midterms. This won’t help Trump win the electoral college, though, because they reside disproportionately in New York, California, and Florida. Rather, Trump will need low-propensity voters—voters who didn’t vote in the midterms—to turn out for him at high rates.

The problem for him is: why would they? True, the polls show that some of these voters now support Trump after supporting Biden in 2020. But supporting is one thing; actually voting is another, and historically, they haven’t voted at high rates. If their support for Trump merely represents a kind of mini-protest—a registration of jadedness, of alignment with Trump’s anti-establishment approach—that seems, at least to me, to be an insufficient hook to draw the most historically reluctant demographics to the polls. Has Trump won over real voters, or has he only won the respect of, ironically, people who relate to his angry screeds because, in their view, this whole politics thing is all bullshit?

Bernie Sanders, any input?

 

–Jim Andersen