Friday, November 18, 2016

IF WE EVER HAVE NORMAL ELECTIONS AGAIN, REPUBLICANS MIGHT BE LULLED BY THEIR TRUMP TURNOUT BUMP

I believe America's electoral system will be unrecognizable in a few years -- suppression of Democratic voting will worsen and there'll be an even freer flow of fat-cat money -- but if I'm being alarmist and democracy manages to proceed more or less as usual, I think Republicans might be lulled into believing that the Trump-driven increase in turnout they experienced this year will be theirs forever, even when Donald Trump isn't at the top of the ticket. In other words, they may mistake his personal popularity for party popularity, just the way Democrats did with regard to Barack Obama.

In The New York Times, David Leonhardt writes:
Barack Obama’s two victories created the impression of a strong wind at the back of the Democratic Party. Its constituencies -- the young, the nonwhite, the college educated -- were not only growing but were also voting in increasing numbers....

The longer view is starting to look quite different, however. None of the other three most recent Democratic presidential nominees -- Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore -- inspired great turnout.... In off-year elections, Democratic turnout is even spottier....

In the simplest terms, Republican turnout seems to have surged this year, while Democratic turnout stagnated....

In [swing-state] counties where Trump won at least 70 percent of the vote, the number of votes cast rose 2.9 percent versus 2012. Trump’s pugnacious message evidently stirred people who hadn’t voted in the past. By comparison, in counties where Clinton won at least 70 percent, the vote count was 1.7 percent lower this year....

For every one voter nationwide who reported having voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016, at least five people voted for Trump after not having voted four years ago. Clinton attracted substantially fewer 2012 nonvoters, the data show. On net, Trump’s gains among nonvoters mattered more than his gains from vote switchers....
Throughout the Obama years, many Democrats assumed that the country was becoming more Democratic, as a matter of demographic inevitability. They believed this even as Democrats got shellacked in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. Wait till 2016, they said. Victory is a lock, because Democrats will have their "presidential electorate."

Much of that "presidential electorate" didn't turn out, because what was called a "presidential electorate" proved to be just an Obama electorate. Republicans might make the same mistake, especially if Trump wins reelection four years from now. (I hate to say it, but I think that's very likely. America hasn't voted out a sitting president in 24 years, and controversial Republican governors -- Scott Walker, Sam Brownback, Paul LePage, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder -- routinely win reelection.) Republicans might think their turnout advantage will persist if Mike Pence or Paul Ryan is the nominee in 2024. But it will turn out that the Trump bump was all about Trump, not the GOP.

Of course, the GOP has an advantage over the Democrats in elections that don't involve a charismatic candidate. The advantage isn't just white solidarity -- it's the fact that Republican media outlets relentlessly reinforce the sense of Republicanism (and conservatism) as a brand. Republican conservatism may not have a firm ideological foundation -- I agree with Cleek's Law ("Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily") -- but the GOP base eagerly tunes in to right-wing media to have its anger at Democrats and liberals reinforced on a daily basis. A large percentage of Democratic voters don't do this. Most Democrats aren't reading lefty websites every day or watching Rachel Maddow every night, and we barely have any talk radio. So the brand isn't reinforced. And the GOP/conservative brand is reinforced by the NRA, the evangelical movement, and other anti-liberal forces.

Trump may fool Republicans into thinking they'll run the country forever. They won't -- unless they change the institutions of democracy to ensure that they do, which could very well happen.

7 comments:

bigp7099 said...

Never commented here and don't usually as a rule anywhere and not an American but I find your writing interesting. But! Isn't the premise here flawed, isn't the real problem just turnout? How can you have a functioning democracy when hardly anybody votes in the first place.

Victor said...

There's a possiblity that we won't have free elections in the future. And those we do have, if we have them, will have voter's caged, and non-white Christian peoples votes suppressed.

Today's conservatives are not your father's of grandfather's conservatives. Those folks believed in democracy. The current cabal, uhm... not so much. Or, not at all. They'll use Russia as their model - a one-party election. Somthing that would have horrified Ike, Nixon, Goldwater, Ford, etc.

Maybe I'm overly worried.
But, I suspect that in the future, if they have any suspicion that they may lose, they will do whatever they can to ensure that that doesn't happen.

I hope I'm wrong - as I have been rather often of late.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh.........

Never Ben Better said...

"I believe America's electoral system will be unrecognizable in a few years -- suppression of Democratic voting will worsen and there'll be an even freer flow of fat-cat money"

And you can stop right there. By the end of the Trump/Pence first term (and what odds Trump hasn't resigned or died before the four years are up?) Democratic voter suppression will be so far advanced that the bloodless coup that Feud speaks of in the comments on the story below will be cemented in place. Bye-bye Voting Rights Act in its entirety; blind eyes at Justice to egregious suppression, with an ultra-right-wing Supreme Court on tap to slap down any protests that do slip by through the lower courts; need I go on?

Maybe the right wing will screw things up so badly that eventually they'll fall from power. But I'm 67 and I don't think I'll live to see it, even in the relative safety of my Massachusetts bunker.

Monte Davis said...

Republicans might be lulled into believing that the Trump-driven increase in turnout they experienced...

Again: the Republican increase in turnout over 2012 was 318,000 nationwide. The Democratic decline was 3,502,000.

By all means, let's focus on Trump's massive vote-pulling power, which was obviously the crucial factor in the outcome.

Feud Turgidson said...

I like Dave Leonardt. He's PollyAnna but he means well. David Carr and he spoke well of each other, that mean's something.

All he's done here is read YouGov, spoke to the dudes there who did the work, ruminated some, and organized his produce into the sort of bins and displays the Times insists on.

Read the source work, folks. These YouGov dudes keep popping up; they're real stats dweebs, and at this point they're more interesting and maybe important to the future of polling than almost anyone or maybe even anyone.

Steve M.'s to be thanked for his own further ruminations and cutting out all that cheap crap in the Times' packaging. He's in their position in this human reporting centipede, which doesn't afford a wide-open view but at least the fermentation process to date suggests the basic stuff is sound.

An accurate, truthful hopefully useful picture is emerging actually pretty quickly. I kind of hope like everyone the answer is Hillary or her campaign screwed up, because that sounds less hopeless for the future. But it's more complicated than even She Should Have Picked Perez. I used to think picking Perez meant she WOULD win; now it's more like going Latino means she MIGHT have won.

Ths picture emerging - it's still unclear, tho - is if the GOP gives Rs a paranoic crook, or a handsome addled figurehead, or a befuddled dipwad who says Baptisty thangs and finds defenselss brown folks to bomb, maim & kick, or Paul Popeil in a golden toupe, then the R base will come out and put out for that, and it's Mourning in America agin. And meanwhile if we come up with some wonk who also looks good, talks goods and pulls the babes, we get Camelot for a while.

That's evidence of a lot of things, but mostly what a bunch of lobotomized dipwits voters are.

Jimbo said...

Boy, there is a lot to work with here. I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the anger of the Millennials, brown and black voters and liberal white voters as a positive force. But the Democrats have been lousy about mobilizing them. In part, this is because there is no "left wing" massive communication vehicle and the voter education project is only during elections, if then. Fox and all the corporate MSM align along the extreme right or the center right and their people always vote (until they die). Hollywood celebrities periodically making ads are no substitute, obviously. Democrats in Congress could challenge the GOP majority to invest in the GOP voting poor states (infrastructure, new industries) but the GOP has no incentive to do so since a more educated electorate is dangerous for them. The other point that I think needs to be mentioned is that, unfortunately, by nature, people find it easier to say NO reflexively and that advocating change even the fairly reasonable but unexciting changes HRC was advocating is scarier for the average voter. Whereas, as we know, Trump the Con offered red meat and future wins (so much so we will be tired of winning). All complete bullshit but a population without critical thinking just accepts that.

navamske said...

"Republicans might make the same mistake, especially if Trump wins reelection four years from now. (I hate to say it, but I think that's very likely. America hasn't voted out a sitting president in 24 years.)”

On January 20, 2017, Trump will at 70 be the oldest person to take his first oath of office as president. Assuming he doesn't get bored with the presidency, I don't see him running again, given that he would be 74 years old when January 20, 2021, rolls around.