Turning Non-Voters Into Voters Starts Now
The most important story from recent elections is that a lot of new voters were motivated to go to the polls. More will be needed to win next time.
In the 2020 presidential election 21 million more people voted than in 2016. Almost 67 percent of the voting age population went to the polls, the highest percent in 120 years.
In Wisconsin, turnout in the presidential race was 230,000 more than the previous high.
Two years earlier, in the 2018 midterm election, turnout nationwide was the highest since 1914, and in Wisconsin, the highest on record.
For the media, campaigns are about “turning out the base”. But winning has not been so much about the base, as about new voters.
Trump almost won Wisconsin last year when he got 205,000 of the 230,000 new votes, while Biden was able just to match Obama’s numbers from eight years previous.
Evers won for governor in 2018 because 80 percent of the new votes that year were Democratic. Enough Democrats who don’t usually vote in off-year elections were motivated enough to go to the polls to defeat Scott Walker.
Both of Trump’s campaigns energized new voters. It was a deliberate strategy and his huge public rallies were part of it. It is “absolutely untrue” that the president “is strictly running a base election,” Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communication director was quoted at the time. Of those who attended a late October rally in Wisconsin, “47.5 percent were not modeled as Republicans and 24 percent did not vote at all in 2016. The president is expanding his support.”
When I started in politics, the accepted wisdom was that turnout is fixed. Campaigns were won and lost by how the three-to-five percent of voters in the middle decided to vote.
After looking at ward and precinct numbers over several decades, I am convinced that turnout is the major driving force in who wins the election, who loses. Campaigns are won and lost not by how the small percentage of “undecideds” vote but by who comes out to vote, and who stays home.
Turnout is a variable that becomes part of campaign strategy. I was made a believer during a Democratic primary for governor in Illinois. The challenger to the Party’s endorsed candidate assumed that all the usual primary voters would vote for the endorsed candidate and his only chance of winning was to double the normal turnout. Everything the campaign did was focused on energizing new primary voters. They did double turnout and won by a few thousand votes.
In Kathleen’s first race for the State Senate the campaign focused on increasing turnout in Democratic wards in which voting dropped off substantially in off-year elections. We calculated that for every 10 additional people we could convince to vote, seven would vote for Kathleen. Turnout increased by 7,000. Kathleen got 5,000 of those votes and won by 2,000, even though the incumbent got more votes than in the previous election which he won.
Even with the increased turnout in recent elections, the pool of non-voters is still large – some 30 percent of the voting age population. Non-voters continue to be younger, have fewer years of formal education, and lower incomes than voters, the PEW Research Center reported in its study of the 2020 election. They also pay less attention to politics; social media provides much of the information they receive.
Whichever party convinces more of those non-voters to vote than the other will win the next election.
“It won’t make any difference” is the common response from non-voters. If we want them to vote Democratic, we have to show that their vote does make a difference. That life is better when Democrats are elected. The supports they need to move ahead are available. The economy is working. Their communities are welcoming and pleasant places to live.
Campaign promises don’t cut it. Passing legislation doesn’t mean much if the program doesn’t show up in the neighborhood.
Renters aren’t helped when the billions allocated for rental assistance earlier this year gets caught up in the bureaucracy and doesn’t flow to the renters who need it. Posturing by moderate and progressive Democrats in Congress over which of their proposals has to be voted on first doesn’t get stuff done.
To make a difference we actually have to deliver. Put our ideals into practice.
Rush Limbaugh said something after George Floyd’s murder that should get our attention. “This is a blue state where this happened; this is a state run by Democrats; this is a state run by leftists. … Don’t forget these are the people who have been promising their African American voters this stuff’s gonna stop for 50 years. They don’t fix anything.”
If we want to energize new voters. We have to fix stuff.
It can’t all be left to elected officials. We are good at demanding, protesting, and signing petitions for them to act. Not so good at asking, “What can I do to help?”
The next election is not that far away. The case to non-voters about whether they should care, or not, is already being made. What gets done now will matter much more than what we say a month before the election.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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