NOTE: This is the sixth item in The Democratic Strategist’s Roundtable Discussion on swing and base voter strategies. Focusing on the Mountain West as a potential “swing region,” it’s by Joan McCarter, who is a Fellow/Contributing Editor at Daily Kos, where she posts as McJoan.
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Ed Kilgore began this roundtable discussion with two questions: are swing voters worth the trouble? Can Democrats win with base mobilization alone?
From a regional perspective, and specifically the region that currently holds the hopes of so many Democrats—the Mountain West—there’s little choice for Democrats but to find a way to appeal to swing voters. In the Mountain West region, comprised of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, Republicans hold about a 12 point registration advantage. The reality is that a Democrat doesn’t win in many parts of the region unless they can appeal to the always elusive independent or unaffiliated voter, not to mention some Republicans.
This isn’t a new phenomenon for Democrats in the West—it’s why you rarely find a Western Dem who is an enthusiastic supporter of gun control, for example. Finding avenues of nonpartisan, and even anti-partisan, appeal have been critical to the survival of the Western Democrat in the lean years since Ronald Reagan helped solidify the region as solidly red, as has keeping the national party at arm’s length. The key for the Democratic Party in shaping a strategy for the 2008 elections will be allowing Democrats running in the region to run with a high degree of independence from the national party’s message and structure. The key for Democrats running in the West will be to find those issues that can be branded as Democratic and that uphold our progressive values.
Note: this discussion has been well informed by a Democracy Corps survey and memo from April, 2007.
(1) Who are the swing and base voters?
In the Mountain West, swing voters can be just about any voter. While in each of the states the Republicans have a distinct registration advantage, that imbalance obviously doesn’t play out state-wide or in every race. Part of this is due to the inheritance of Western voters of the idea of the Western character. Paramount to that ideal is independence, an ideal that plays out politically to an extent in voting behavior. Historically, party structures in the Mountain West have been relatively weak; politicians are more likely to run as individuals first and members of a party second and voters pride themselves on voting for the individual, not the party. There’s a marked anti-partisan attitude among traditional Western voters.
Getting an empirical handle on the exact voter breakdown in some of these states to determine base vs. swing percentages is a challenge. If you take the last two presidential elections as establishing the base Democratic vote, the range is from 26 percent in Utah to 48.5 percent in New Mexico. It’s not a perfect measure for the voting demographics, but gives an essential baseline, particularly in states like Idaho and Utah where it takes a real yellow dog to vote for the Democratic nominee.
It’s important to note that, in the context of this region, anti-partisan is not the equivalent of bipartisan. Western voters are highly pragmatic, looking for problem solvers first, and ideological debate is of less interest than action on many issues. While they would like the parties to work together, it’s more important that things get done, even if that takes a bulldozer of a politician, like Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer was in the 2007 legislative session, to do it. Because the independently minded voter places a higher value on action than on compromise, contrast is more important than comity in appealing to them. The individual candidate is also more important than the party he or she represents for many Western voters.
Thus, the prototypical swing voters in the Mountain West are better defined as ticket-splitters than as “swingers.” They might be perfectly willing to send the Democrat that they know and trust back to the House of Representatives in DC, but if a fellow Democrat is running for another House or Senate seat, they’ll probably look to the Republican in the race, just to make sure their own sense of checks and balances is maintained. As a result, their ticket gets split.
Month: February 2008
Ralph Nader’s announcement of his presidential candidacy on ‘Meet the Press’ yesterday included an insightful critique of the Democratic Party, but clouded by a kind of big-picture myopia Nader-watchers may find familiar. There were several Nader nuggets worth quoting in the MTP interview. Asked by Tim Russert how he would feel if his candidacy handed the presidency to the GOP this year, Nader responded:
Not a chance. If the Democrats can’t landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form. You think the American people are going to vote for a pro-war John McCain who almost gives an indication that he’s the candidate of perpetual war, perpetual intervention overseas? You think they’re going to vote for a Republican like McCain, who allies himself with the criminal, recidivistic regime of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the most multipliable impeachable presidency in American history? Many leading members of the bar, including the former head of the American Bar Association, Michael Greco, absolutely dismayed over the violations of the Constitution, our federal laws, the criminal, illegal war in Iraq and the occupation? There’s no way. That’s why we have to take this opportunity to have a much broader debate on the issues that relate to the American people…
I doubt Nader will make a difference in the ’08 outcome this year, given the ’04 vote. What I find exasperating is that he could have made a difference for the better as a presidential candidate — if he would have campaigned within the Democratic Party. Certainly he would have gotten more media coverage for the causes he cares about. But it will never happen, since Nader harbors an almost splenetic contempt for the Democratic Party and the two-party duopoly in general. Also, he may figure that if Edwards and Kucinich couldn’t get much traction with an anti-corporate message as Dems, he wouldn’t either. Still, Nader’s speechmaking and debating skills are a match for any Democratic candidate and are instructive for our future candidates. For better or worse, he could do more to push the party leftward from the inside.
There’s a lot more Dems can learn from Nader, including the paramount importance of doing the homework and the way he marshalls his arguments and commands facts. There’s also his integrity, energy — still remarkable at age 74 — and his work ethic that sparked critical reforms like OSHA, EPA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Safe Drinking Water Act.. Few Dems can match his record as a reformer. Yet today he choses to be a fringe figure, rather than an influential force in defining the national debate in one of the leading parties.
Ralph Nader has earned respect and admiration for his numerous accomplishments as a ‘public citizen.’ But he hasn’t made the case that a large number of votes for him wouldn’t help the Republicans. He ignores the fact that the aforementioned reforms were enacted by Democratic leadership. Given the choice of voting for a candidate for President who can actually win and provide some real world change, I think I’ll hang with the donkeys.
NOTE: This is the fifth item in The Democratic Strategist’s Roundtable Discussion on swing and base voter strategies. It’s by Al From, Founder and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council.
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Politics is littered with false choices – and, to me, no choice is more false for Democrats than choosing between a political strategy aimed at increasing our base vote and a political strategy aimed at winning over swing voters. To win elections consistently and build an enduring political and governing majority, we need to pursue both strategies.
I define base voters as those who reliably vote Democratic in every election whether we do well or poorly. In any election, they will likely be the largest bloc voting Democratic, but they are less than 50 percent of the electorate. We need to get every one of them to the polls – and we need to increase their numbers. That’s why we should pursue strategies to find and turn out non-voters who would surely vote Democratic if they made it to the polls.
Swing voters are those who vote Democratic in some elections, Republican in others. Even in today’s more polarized electorate, they swing back and forth between the parties. When enough of them join Democratic base voters in voting for us, we generally win. When too many of them vote for the other side, the Republicans win. We obviously need strategies to persuade swing voters to vote Democratic in each election – and we ought to take every opportunity we can convince them to change their voting habits and become reliable Democratic (or base) voters.
Do read AFL-CIO Director of Organizing Stewart Acuff’s remembrance of Reverend James Orange at Campaign for America’s Future ‘Blog for Our Future.” James Orange was MLK’s street guy, the one he called on to get young people and even gang members involved in King’s historic campaigns against racial injustice, and he also served as MLK’s March mobilizer and was with King when he was assassinated. Acuff recalls:
During the 1960s and 1970s, Rev. Orange was a key field organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. More than that, he was a member of Dr. Martin Luther King’s inner circle. He joined Dr. King during the Birmingham movement where he organized the demonstrations of school children who were firehosed and attacked by police dogs. Those images broadcast across the nation helped turn public opinion to support the civil rights movement.
Rev. Orange also played key roles in civil rights actions in Selma, Memphis and Chicago—and in Dr. King’s last campaign, the Poor People’s Movement. In both Memphis and Chicago Rev. Orange was assigned to deal with the street gangs attracted to the movement but not committed to King’s nonviolent civil disobedience. He never stopped teaching activists and organizers the principles and basic tactics and strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience.
In 1977 Rev. Orange became a union organizer. He personified the link between the civil rights movement and the union movement. He understood at his core what Dr. King taught – that civil rights without economic rights or justice was insufficient.
Reverend and I began working together in 1985 when I went to Atlanta as an organizer for SEIU to start the Georgia State Employees Union (GSEU/SEIU Local 1985). Reverend knew activists and political leaders all over Georgia and he opened doors for me and our staff wherever we went. He marched with us in Milledgeville and Savannah, helped with a 72 hour, round the clock, vigil and picket line in Augusta, and when budget cuts threatened staffing levels at state hospitals and prisons, Reverend Orange helped us take over state department heads’ offices and went to jail with us.
Acuff has more to say about Orange’s amazing spirit and uncompromising integrity, which I also witnessed when I worked with Orange on a number of projects. He was the best of a great generation of young men and women who answered the call of history and never lost faith or courage, even after MLK was assassinated. Orange continued the fight for social justice until his last breath.
Orange was a gifted labor organizer and after King was assassinated, he led some 300 union organizing campaigns across the southeast. He was once well-described in Southern Exposure magazine as a “big black mountain of a man,” standing about 6’3″ and hitting the scales just south of 300 lbs. Other writers knick-named him “the gentle giant,” partly in tribute to the open-hearted way he embraced ostracized minorities in organizing the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. March in Atlanta. Orange was sort of a ‘pied piper’ as well, commanding an army of political activists who conducted voter registration drives for every Atlanta election and organizing a group called “the blue crew” that turned out the black vote to elect Atlanta’s Black mayors and African American members of congress. He and his activist wife, Cleo raised a house full of great kids, who also became activists.
James Orange was the most widely-loved of King’s lieutenants, and his memorial service at Morehouse College’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Chapel on Saturday will be SRO. Both Senators Obama and Clinton sent messages of tribute praising Orange’s contributions. Indeed, neither candidate would be contending for the Democratic nomination without the groundwork laid by James Orange and his followers.
NOTE: This is the fourth item in The Democratic Strategist’s Roundtable Discussion of swing and base voter strategies. It’s by Chris Bowers, co-founder of Open Left and Treasurer of BlogPac.
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In any discussion of “swing voters,” who are typically grouped by demographics or psychographics, it is first important to differentiate themselves from “swing states” in presidential elections. “Swing states” are the perhaps a dozen or so states with partisan voting tendencies in presidential elections that most closely mirror national partisan voting tendencies. In close presidential elections, “swing states” are the states that could narrowly vote for the nominee of either major party no matter who wins the national popular vote. As such, they determine the winner of the Electoral College, and are thus rightfully termed “swing” states.
“Swing voters,” or swing voting demographics, are typically defined as demographic groups with partisan voting patterns that closely mirror those of the national electorate as a whole. But a moment’s reflection should remind us that swing voters are not analogous to swing states. Eking out a narrow victory among such closely-divided groups as Catholics or self-identified “moderates” is meaningless unless it contributes to victory in swing states. The proper goal in appealing to swing voters—and for that matter, all voters—is to outperform historic partisan performance in as many demographic groups as possible, and by as much as possible, thus winning “swing states.”
It is in this fundamental sense that every voting demographic is a swing voter demographic, and the ancient dichotomy between swing and base voter strategies is largely a false choice.
I do not argue that “base voters”–those voters who always vote and who never split their tickets–do not exist. They do, and they are well known to local campaigns and precinct captains. But if any special messaging, campaign resources or assistance of any sort is required to bring a voter to the polls, then that voter is not a “base voter.”
If the outcome of a person’s vote is ever in doubt—because they may not vote, may vote Republican, may be undecided between the two parties, may be undecided between a major party and a third party, or may have a physical illness, disability or travel related conflict that could prevent him or her from voting–then that voter is a swing voter who must be targeted in some fashion by the Democratic campaign in question. If, in order to secure someone’s vote, it is necessary to appeal to that person with a partisan, progressive ideological message, that person is just as much a swing voter as someone whose vote can be secured through a message of bipartisan unity and an anti-ideological message of moderation and pragmatism. Beyond the individual level, unless a voting group has a partisan voting tendency of 100% in favor of a given party, and unless every member of that demographic will always vote without any prompting whatsoever, then it is always possible for the nominees of both major parties to outperform their historic vote share and historic vote total in every single demographic.
Consider, for example, that according to an analysis of national exit polls from the 2004 and the 2006 elections, in 2006 Democrats actually improved their overall share of the national vote more from Democrats, 2.4%, than from Independents, 2.1%. Even though John Kerry won 89% of the Democratic vote, by increasing the Democratic vote for Democrats to a record 93%, and by increasing the self-identified Democratic share of the electorate from 37% to 38%, Democrats gained more among self-identified Democrats than they gained among any other group. Further, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey, the largest gains Republicans made in partisan self-identification from 2000 to 2004 among any demographic group were born again / evangelical white Christians. As a group, at the end of 2004, white, born again / evangelical Christians self-identified as Republicans 8% more than they did in 2000, accounting for the largest partisan shift of any demographic group in the country. While self-identified Democrats would typically be viewed as “base” voters for Democrats, and while white, born again / evangelical Christians would typically be viewed as “base” voters for Republicans, those two groups were actually the two largest “swing” demographics in the 2006 and 2004 elections respectively. Even voting demographics with partisan voting tendencies that favor one party in the extreme should be viewed by both parties as swing demographics worthy of voter targeting efforts.
Every demographic is a swing demographic. It is possible for a nominee to improve on his or her party’s share of the vote in every demographic, and it is also possible for a campaign to increase the size of any demographic group as a percentage of the electorate. As such, at least in terms of votes, the swing voter versus base mobilization question is not a binary opposition, but rather a question of which voters can be captured for the least amount of campaign resources, and what sort of messaging will result in the largest number of votes possible. And it is over this issue of resources where the true base- versus-swing issue emerges.
I guess we’d be derelict in faling to note the big political story of the day: the New York Times piece on John McCain’s questionable dealings with lobbyists, particularly a certain lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. There’s the story, and then there’s the story about the story, and it’s hard at this point to know where the evidence will lead next.
But it was amusing to watch certain conservatives who can’t stand John McCain, but who hate the New York Times, chase their own tails in reacting to the story.
As usual, Rush Limbaugh descended into madness most quickly and thoroughly. In an email to The Politico, Limbaugh said this:
The story is not the story. The story is the drive-by media turning on its favorite maverick and trying to take him out. The media picked the GOP’s candidate, the NYT endorsed him while they sat on this story, and is now, with utter predictability, trying to destroy him.
Gee, if only we’d known the New York Times had the power to choose the Republican presidential nominee. We’d have lobbied for Tom Tancredo.
NOTE: This is the third item in The Democratic Strategist’s Rountable Discussion on swing and base voters. It’s by Brookings Institution senior fellow and TDS Co-Editor Bill Galston.
It’s hard to discuss “swing voters” without a precise definition of the term. The best I’ve seen so far is that of Northeastern University political scientist William Mayer: A swing voter, he says, is one who could go either way, one not so solidly committed as to make persuasion all but futile. Relative to committed voters, swing voters have mixed or balanced attitudes about the major-party candidates, as measured by the difference between the two on the American National Election Studies (ANES) so-called “feeling thermometer.” If the maximum theoretical difference is 100, corresponding to total approval of one candidate and disapproval of the other, voters who see a gap of 15 points or less constitute the pool of potential “persuadables.” Since 1972, swing voters, so defined, have averaged 23 percent of the total in ANES preelection surveys.
Mayer does not underscore a crucial point that emerges from his data: the ideological distance between the major-party candidates strongly affects the percentage of swing voters. In 1976, the Republicans nominated a moderate after a fierce intra-party battle, while the Democrats nominated a newcomer widely regarded as their most conservative candidate in decades. As a consequence, swing voters amounted to a full 34 percent of the electorate, by far the highest in any election in the past three decades. In 2004, by contrast, the Democrats nominated a Massachusetts liberal to run against a Republican who had governed as a movement conservative. In this context, swing voters amounted to only 13 percent of the total, by far the lowest in the past three decades.
This relationship has important consequences for 2008: the Democrats’ choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will shape, not only how swing voters will vote, but also how many swing voters there will be. Consider a recent Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Public Opinion Strategies survey for NPR, which compares the two Democrats against McCain. In a Clinton/McCain contest, McCain receives 9 percent of the Democratic vote, while Clinton receives 5 percent of the Republican vote. In an Obama/McCain matchup, by contrast, McCain gets 18 percent of the Democratic vote and Obama, 13 percent of Republicans. Roughly speaking, a general election between Obama and McCain roughly doubles the number of partisans who can contemplate crossing party lines. All other things being equal, a less polarizing contest, when voters can see advantages and disadvantages in both candidates, will expand the pool of voters open to persuasion.
The net effect of this expansion depends on circumstances. The NPR survey indicates than McCain receives only 48 percent of Independents when facing Obama, versus 58 percent against Clinton. But because Clinton does a better job of consolidating the base, McCain ends up with same share of the total vote—48 percent—against each of the Democratic contenders.
A snapshot cannot foreshadow the dynamics of the general election, of course. The partisans of Sen. Obama can argue, plausibly enough, that wavering Democrats will “come home” as the differences between him and Sen. McCain are cast in higher relief. The partisans of Sen. Clinton can retort that this same process of differentiation will reduce Obama’s appeal to Republicans, and that in addition, as Independents learn more about the gap between his unifying rhetoric and his traditionally liberal position on the issues, some of them will switch as well. To pile uncertainty on uncertainty, the relationship between Independents and swing voters is loose at best: as Mayer shows, many Independents are covert partisans, and they make up only 41 percent of the total pool of swing voters. At this point, we have far more variables than equations, making prediction impossible.
What we can say is this: if a McCain/Obama contest did no more than increase the share of swing voters from its 2004 low to its post-1968 average, an additional 10 percent of the electorate would be in play after the parties’ conventions, shifting both campaigns away from all-out mobilization and toward persuasion. By contrast, if Sen. Clinton turned out to be as polarizing as her detractors maintain, the tone of the 2008 election could bear more than a passing resemblance to 2004 . . . which is not to say that the outcome would necessarily be the same.
With a lot of the focus of the Democratic presidential contest now shifting towards labor-heavy OH and PA, it’s significant that Barack Obama is picking up an endorsement from the Teamsters. This gives him endorsements from four of the seven unions of the Change to Win coalition (one, the Farm Workers, has endorsed HRC), and increases the possibility that the entire coalition could make its first-ever joint endorsement. Clinton, however, still has the lion’s share of endorsements by AFL-CIO unions, though not enough to make a federation joint endorsement likely.
There’s obviously plenty of stuff available today about Barack Obama’s double-digit win in Wisconsin yesterday, but perhaps the most interesting analysis is by RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost, who looks closely at the evidence that Obama, for the first time, began to win in demographic categories previously dominated by Clinton. He concludes that we may finally be seeing evidence of a “momentum effect” for Obama. But it’s a relatively small effect, and Cost thinks we won’t know for sure if it’s in play until Texas and Ohio weigh in.
NOTE: This, the second item in The Democratic Strategist’s Roundtable Discussion on swing and base voter strategies, is an excerpt from political organizer and strategist Robert Creamer‘s recent book, “Listen To Your Mother: Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win.” It’s reprinted with permission of the publisher.
In election campaigns our goal is to change the behavior of the voters, since they are the actual decision-makers. Sometimes there are secondary targets as well, but the secondary targets are only important insofar as they can help us impact the primary targets—voters.
And our primary targets are not just any voters. They are the only two categories of voters whose electoral behavior can be changed by a campaign. We call them persuadable voters and mobilizable voters.
Persuadable voters have two characteristics:
•They generally vote.
•They are undecided.
Mobilizable voters also have two characteristics:
•They would support our candidate.
•They are unlikely to vote unless they are mobilized to do so.
In many political campaigns, massive amounts of political resources are wasted because they are used to communicate with voters who are not part of one of these two groups. They are spent trying to convince voters who always vote Democratic to vote for a Democrat, or they are spent trying to convince people who always vote Republican to vote Democratic. They may also be spent trying to convince voters who never vote, but would vote Republican if they did, to vote Democratic. All of these are wastes of campaign resources, since the behavior of these target voters will not likely change.
Democrats are particularly prone to target voters who always vote Democratic—and always go out to vote—with resources that should go elsewhere.
Of course, base Democrats who always vote are critically important to campaigns as potential sources of volunteers and contributors. But they are not primary targets for the campaign’s message since we don’t want their voting behavior to change. They always vote Democratic, and always go out to vote. They behave that way no matter what is done by the campaign.
In an election, persuadable and mobilizable voters are never the same people—and our communication with these two distinct groups has two different goals.
This is one of the most important rules of effective electoral politics, — and one that is most often violated, forgotten and confused.
