November 1, 2010

• Why Democrats will win or lose tomorrow’s election

  All kinds of crazy idiotic theories will abound tomorrow describing this or that as the “key” reason Democrats lost so many seats or managed to hang on to so many seats. Most of them will be self serving reasons. But the truth is the one thing that really will have a deciding impact on which party takes over what seats in the upcoming elections is really simple. It’s who shows up.

  Now I don’t mean that it in the trivial sense. Obviously all elections are determined by who shows up at the polls. No, I mean in particular Democrats have long had this huge problem whereby large swaths of their constituents just don’t show up to the polls. This is especially true of midterm elections.  That’s why, as David Dayen explains here, if you look at the population of the United States who votes, conservatives are correct when they declare us to be a Center Right nation, but if you look at the population of the United States who are eligible to vote, we’re more of a Center Left country.

  So all the polls that media analysts, newscasters, and politicians all use to predict who they think is going to win an election are all based on this idea that we can statistically determine who is more “likely” to vote and poll them primarily.  To determine who is a “likely voter” they ask questions like “how likely are you to vote” and “did you vote in the last election” and “how closely do you follow politics”.  Sometimes they even match your identification against your voter history and if you just haven’t voted very often in the past you are excluded from the likely voter poll. This generally works pretty well. The only times it doesn’t work is if there is a large cultural phenomenon that causes a lot of people who were marked as unlikely to vote to vote or else causes a lot of people who were marked as likely to vote to NOT vote. That could happen because there are some last minute revelations about some candidate or another that drives people to or away from teh polls, or if there’s some freak weather event or some other big surprise. Or it could result just from a lot of really hard work and determination on the part of on the ground political advocates pushing really hard to “get out the vote”. 

  And each year, polling agencies try to make their models more and more effective at predicting any and all eventualities whilst political candidates try to defy the odds and make the unexpected happen.

  Now the group of registered voters who do not vote and are counted as unlikely voters tend to share certain characteristics.  One they absolutely tend to be younger.  Another they tend to be more women and nonwhites. And they also tend to trend poorer and less educated on average. They also tend by and large to be more liberal and vote more often Democrat.

  During the 2008 elections Obama managed to turn a LOT of these unlikely voters into ACTUAL voters. Many more people turned out to the polls than people expected. Part of it was his message of hope. Part of it was the allure of being a part of history and electing the first Black President. Part of it was his very very innovative use of modern technology to get out the vote and harness social networking tools to organize activists into powerful mobilizing forces.

  And part of it was just that Democrats always get more of their electorate out during the Presidential election year than during off years.

  2010 is an off year. There’s no Obama on the ticket. And no matter how much Obama campaigns there’s a lot of people who do support the President who are likely to stay home. They have lives that matter to them a lot more. Feeding their kids matters more. Keeping their jobs. They feel like they don’t have the time or the energy to educate themselves about the candidates and figure out who to vote for. And they are disenchanted and don’t believe that their vote on most years makes a difference. It’s one thing to go out and vote during a historic Presidential election. It’s another thing to go out and vote for somebody they never heard of after they’ve been struggling to survive for the last two years.

  Now even though the pool of unlikely voters leans left, there are those among them that are definitely more persuaded by right wing ideology. And compounding the Democrats problem this election year is that large numbers of them have become more likely voters. The right wing message that THIS IS AN EMERGENCY! has resonated strongly and clearly amongst those groups. They are mobilized and planning on showing up at the polls no matter what.

  The Obama administration, and indeed the entire left wing movement, needed to focus heavily over the last two years on all those massive numbers of unlikely voters who don’t show up at polls in most years, especially those who DID show up during the 2008 election. Had they been able to ascertain what it is that they could do that would ensure that these voters show up at the polls in 2010 no matter what, it would make all the difference during the 2010 elections. Had the Obama electorate been as fired up and excited about the Democrats in 2010 as they were in 2008, the Democrats would have lost few seats even though historically a President’s party almost always lose seats in the first off year election after they are elected.

  But here’s the thing the Left wing activists and bloggers I read aren’t understanding. A lot of them are seeing how effective the message of FEAR has been for the Republican party in mobilizing their base and convincing unlikely Republican voters to vote and are wondering why we can’t mobilize the Left just as well. They perceive a take over by the Right as being no less scary and indeed far MORE scary. And they will speak to you at great depth about all the many ways in which the Right IS Scary whether it be their anti-illegal, anti-muslim, or anti-gay stances; their pro-war, pro-wire tapping, pro-indefinite detentions stances,  or their anti-abortion to the point of requiring a young girl to bear their rapist father’s child stance, or their support for tax cuts for the rich in expense of the middle class, or their anti-science anti-global warming anti-environmentalism, pro-creationism stances.  In the minds of your average liberal who keeps closely abreast of politics, however wrong the Democrats may happen to be on any number of issues, this current crop of Republican candidates running for office is about a thousand times more terrifying and dangerous.  It ought to be enough, they think, to simply explain this to people and remind them of the horrors wrought by the Bush years to get people to come out in droves.

  But I think this is a mistake. Democrats and liberals are fundamentally misunderstanding their electorate.

  You see the kinds of people who aren’t voting and lean Left are exactly NOT the kinds of people who are easily motivated by a message of fear. Indeed they are the kind of electorate that is fundamentally instantly SKEPTICAL of any kind of fear based approach to politics. That’s exactly WHY they reject Fox News so quickly and so easily. The idea that there are these scary dangerous bigoted racist people out there who are going to ruin the nation is something that to them requires a very HIGH level of proof. They are a lot less authoritarian than the Right. Simply the fact that a resource they trust tells them so is insufficient to convince them.

  And what’s more there’s the psychology of it. Whether the horror story described by liberal pundits of what might happen should Republicans cease control is true or not, MOST of the Democratic electorate who will stay home tomorrow certainly don’t WANT to believe it. They don’t want to believe that their neighbors are evil or gullible or being easily bought. They mostly want to believe that the world is for the most part okay. They want to believe that so long as they follow the rules and mind their own business they’ll be okay too.

  The fact is the divisiveness and noise turns these kinds of voters off. The negative ads, the dark tone, the fear mongering and the hate fueled rhetoric makes them want to stay home. It reenforces their suspicion deep down that their vote can’t make a difference. When you watch a hundred vicious commercials funded by well paid anonymous political action committees and then get 50 ridiculous robocalls urging you to vote, you can quickly just become disgusted with it all. You throw your hands up and laugh at the ridiculous absurdity of this whole system. It’s a game played by a few elites. They feel that nothing THEY can do will really make any kind of difference in the outcome of that game. They just end up being pawns around for the ride. Why should they vote? Why should they care?  If there’s a battle to be fought for the freedom of the society they don’t see it as being fought in the realm of electoral politics.

  By the way, it’s this large component of the disinterested masses that Jon Stewart’s rally was reaching out to and doing so quite effectively in my opinion.

  But it takes a lot of convincing, and much more than one rally, to compel them to think that this political process really CAN make a difference. Some amazing political leaders can give amazing speeches that drive  home that message and get these unlikely masses to the poll but it’s always hard. What MIGHT have worked better is bringing home tangible political results to these people that you can point to DIRECTLY and say “Look, this is how YOUR life is better because so and so is in power and THIS is how your life will become even BETTER if you keep them in power”. 

  That’s the kind of campaign Democrats needed to be able to at least try to run in 2010. But they had a hard time doing it because they were only able to pass supposedly pragmatic reasonable legislation that has few immediately visible tangible results in real people’s lives. These abstract accomplishments sound good on paper but are unconvincing in the real world.

  But that might not have worked either. Not only because it’s unclear whether a dispirited electorate would have responded better even if there were tangible benefits to point to, but also because it’s not even clear that legislation with more visibly tangible benefits could have even been passed with such a split congress and obstructionist Republican opposition.

  So that leaves only one real option to me that would have been sure to fire up the base.  BE the outsider President and the outsider party. That is, rather than work with the system, President Obama could have tried to turn the whole system completely upside down.  That’s what they have been accused of being by the Right anyway even though they’ve only made changes within the system many of which are easily reversible.  Had, the President fought instead to try and radically rework Washington from the ground up and constantly called to the people to rally behind him to support that effort, things might have been very different. The people could maybe have stayed motivated for two whole years as they observed people in Washington on their side fighting for THEM, trying to reform the political system so that THEY have more influence and getting stopped by the enormous powers that oppose it in Washington.

  Even that probably would not have worked (though I think Progressives would be happier with that outcome even if it had failed, just because it would have started changing the parameters of the national dialogue) Still it might just be a delusional pipe dream. We’ve seen outsider movemetns succeed in the past but they are rarely driven by a President or a traditional Party. They are generally driven by true outsider activists like Martin Luther King. And they are met with enormous opposition BY the President and the party establishment, EVEN that of the party supposedly on their side.

  In any case what’s clear is that what will determine the Democrats success or failure tomorrow will be driven primarily by how many of these unlikely voters can be driven to show up at the polls to the shock and amazement of all the pollsters. There’s still a chance that the huge and devoted progressive movement will be able to sway enough voters to mitigate a significant number of the expected loses through their large scale calling campaigns and door to door get out the vote efforts.  Obama’s last minute speeches around the country may also make a significant difference.

  But it all might not change anything. A dispirited, very tired, and very sick of politics electorate is hard to convince to come out to vote no matter what’s at risk.  People understand that all kinds of things can go wrong in 2 years true, but they also believe that there’s always another opportunity to fix things after two years should that happen.  As Stewart says, these are hard times, not end times.

  It’s truly not the end of the world if your party loses one election cycle.

  Probably.

  • 9:18 pm
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