Support the Timberjay by making a donation.

Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Results, more than anything, will get voters to the polls

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 1/22/15

A fascinating new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press provides valuable insights to one of the stranger dynamics in American politics today.

How is it, after all, that …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Results, more than anything, will get voters to the polls

Posted

A fascinating new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press provides valuable insights to one of the stranger dynamics in American politics today.

How is it, after all, that after winning a huge electoral victory in 2008, President Obama watched as his party was shellacked in the mid-term elections in 2010? And yet two years later, voters re-elected Obama by the largest majority since the second term of Ronald Reagan. And two years after that, the voters delivered another pounding to Democrats, in yet another mid-term election hailed by conservatives as just one more repudiation of Obama’s presidency.

Is this a story of an indecisive electorate that can’t make up its mind?

As Pew’s research reveals, this is, in fact, a tale of two very different electorates, one that favors Democrats and the other that favors Republicans.

We all know from history and exit-polling, that voter turnout in presidential election years is much higher than in off-year elections. While U.S. voter turnout is lackluster by the standards of most western countries even in presidential years, it usually hovers somewhere around 50 percent.

But come the off-year elections, as we saw in 2010 and 2014, voter participation falls sharply, and overwhelmingly from groups that traditionally vote Democratic. This year, only about a third of voters made it to the polls, and it was a slice of the electorate that tilted heavily white, wealthy, and conservative.

The Pew study found that, when questioned, the general public in 2014 actually supported Democratic candidates by a fairly wide margin, 41.6 percent to 34.2 percent, with 24.6 percent expressing no preference.

In a presidential year, when higher voter turnout provides a more accurate sampling of the general public as whole, Democrats fare better. Indeed, with the exception of 2004, the Democratic candidate for president has won the largest share of the vote in every presidential election over the past quarter century.

Pew found that support for Democrats is pretty constant regardless of a person’s income. Of those in the top 20 percent, whom Pew labeled the most financially secure, 42 percent said they favored Democrats, which was the exact same margin as among those in the middle 20 percent and in the bottom 20 percent, which Pew labeled the most financially insecure.

By contrast, Republican support peaks at 49 percent among those considered the most financially secure, but falls precipitously as you move down the income scale. By the time you reach the bottom 20 percent, only 17 percent of Americans express support for Republicans.

What saves the GOP from electoral extinction (besides the remarkable gerrymandering the party undertook in 2011) is the disparity in turnout in off-year elections. Among the most financially secure (who favor Republicans 49-42 percent according to Pew), nearly two-thirds are considered likely voters. Among those in the middle, based on income, the percentage of likely voters falls to 36 percent. And by the time you get to the bottom 20 percent of voters, based on income, just one-in-five can be expected to turn out in a mid-term election.

While the media likes to frame every election as either a validation or repudiation of a party or president in power, the story of 2010 and 2014 isn’t that voters changed their minds on the president or the parties. It’s that voters who would have backed Democrats had they bothered to vote in either 2010 or 2014, just didn’t turn out.

The Pew results should uunerve Republicans, because if the Democrats can figure out how to turn their voters out in the off years, the GOP could be consigned to permanent minority status. But there are warning signs for Democrats as well in the data.

For one, even as support for Republicans plummets as you move down the income ladder, Democrats don’t benefit. Instead, it’s the percentage of the population with no preference that greatly increases. While Democrats are overwhelmingly favored over Republicans (42-17 percent) by those in the bottom 20 percent, fully four-in-ten expressed no preference, according to Pew. By contrast, only ten percent of the most financially secure express no preference on the same question.

Some of that indecision among low-income voters is undoubtedly based on a sense of disenfranchisement. In other words, many Americans, particularly those who struggle financially, feel that neither party is representing their interests— and with significant justification. I’m sure had Pew done a similar study in the late 1930s or 40s, low income Americans would have expressed much greater support for Democrats, particularly President Franklin Roosevelt, since the policies of the New Deal did so much to improve their lives.

But Democrats, particularly since the Clinton era, have largely abandoned hard-pressed Americans as an issue. Their rhetoric is aimed to appeal to an ever-shrinking middle class, while their policies, particularly since the Clinton years, have tended to follow the money. While the poor undoubtedly view Republicans as hostile, they have little reason to see the Democrats as strong allies, at least not anymore.

President Obama did offer some useful policy proposals, such as the tax plan outlined Tuesday night in his State of the Union speech. His plan would, in fact, do a lot to help the vast majority of Americans, including the low income, and it would help to stem the astonishing rise in inequality in the U.S. As policy, it comes with a long list of benefits, including new jobs, contrary to Republican claims.

The trouble is, Democrats typically propose such legislation when it has little chance of passage, which is certainly the case today given the current makeup of Congress. It allows Democrats to portray themselves as friends of the poor and the struggling middle class without actually upsetting the apple cart that keeps the money flowing to those at the top.

While his proposals are useful as political messaging, setting the stage for the 2016 presidential campaign, it’s understandable if many voters view them as typical political theater.

Too often, politicians in Washington use rhetorical differences to mask the underlying fact that both parties serve essentially the same interests.

Until Democrats are willing to actually challenge an unsustainable system, in which those at the top continue to reap all the rewards of our economy, they’ll continue to have lackluster turnout among those on the losing end.

In the 1930s and 40s, Franklin Roosevelt enacted policies that actually helped those who struggled, and Americans responded by giving Democrats nearly uninterrupted control of both houses of Congress for forty years.

And during that time inequality reached its lowest levels ever, the economy boomed, and we built a solid middle class for the first time in American history.

Results, more than anything, is what will get struggling Americans out to vote again.