As Democrats (quite appropriately) focus on ways to boost turnout this November, there’s often, in my opinion, an excessive emphasis on “voter enthusiasm” as opposed to more mechanical ways of getting out the vote. But some analysts go even further, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly.

[A]t the Daily Beast today, comedian/activist Dean Obeidallah, in what I assume was not a comedic take, offers an even more dubious variation on the “enthusiasm” theory: the “anger” theory. Angry voters, he asserts, win midterms, and since Republican voters are really angry right now, Democrats are going to get waxed if they don’t get angry, too.
Obeidallah’s data set for his “angry voters win midterms” hypothesis is limited to the last to midterms. In 2006, voters angry at Bush turned out; in 2010, voters angry at Obama turned out. Trouble is, there’s not a big difference in the kind of voters who voted in this two midterms with such different results. The most important difference I can see is that in 2006 over-65 votes preferred Democrats by a 50-48 margin; in 2010 they preferred Republicans by 59-38, reflecting a sharp trend that first manifested itself in 2008. The partisan composition of the electorate in 2010 was marginally more pro-Republican than in 2006, but at some point these sorts of comparison become almost entirely circular: if the voters who turn out tilt Republican, then “Republican turnout” is up. That’s not to say a different electorate is appearing.
More to the point, even if Obeidallah is right in arguing that “anger” is key to midterm turnout and/or victory, there’s an especially germane difference between ’16 and ’10: the party in control of the White House, and thus (invariably) the primary object of voter unhappiness. This, and not some sort of mathematical law, is why parties controlling the White House, particularly when the economy isn’t doing well, tend to lose ground in midterms, and especially second midterms.
So what Obeidallah is really arguing for isn’t a sudden realization among Democrats that anger is powerful, but a very difficult strategy of convincing voters to be angry at the party that does not control the White House, while presumably remaining non-angry at the White House itself. That is an extremely roundabout way of describing what is often called a “two futures” election, where voters resist the natural tendency to make their vote a “referendum” on the status quo, and instead vote on their future policy preferences.
There are exactly two precedents for this sort of appeal actually succeeding. One, the most relevant, is unfortunately pretty distant in time: Harry Truman’s 1948 “Do-Nothing Congress” attack on the GOP, which (a) wasn’t a midterm, and (b) was nestled between two really bad midterms for Democrats. The second, in 1998, is relevant insofar as voters appeared to have been interested in rebuffing congressional GOP overreach mostly attributable to the Clinton impeachment effort. But it’s less relevant because the economy was booming and Clinton’s job approval ratings were over 60%.
So there’s not much evidence Democrats will win any anger-fest in 2014. That’s not to say, of course, that they should not spend a great deal of time and money reaching out to their “base” and encouraging them to vote via a combination of “happy” messages about Obama’s accomplishments and “unhappy” messages about the damage a Republican Congress might do to them. Perhaps even more importantly, Democrats need to let voters who lean their way know where and when and how to vote, and that sitting this one out isn’t acceptable.

In truth, there’s no simple Democratic strategy for ’14. Yes, swing voters will be relatively sparse, but they matter. Yes, “base” turnout efforts will have both a technological and a message component. Yes, “populist” issues like the minimum wage and Medicaid expansion will be useful both with swing and base voters. And yes, different strokes will work with different folks in some parts of the country. But the search for a single bullet is probably a waste of time.

In the midst of a sudden effusion of stories about the likely fate of southern Democratic Senate candidates this fall, I noted at Washington Monthly that one thing to keep in mind is that the African-Americans who form so important a part of southern Democratic turnout sometimes defy the “falloff” pattern:

[A]s everyone has noted who writes extensively about the “midterm falloff” problem for Democrats, in the past the pro-Democratic demographic group least prone to “falloff” has been African-Americans. On occasion (e.g., the Deep South in 1998, and Virginia just last year), black voters have bucked the trend almost entirely. There’s sort of an assumption that black turnout is driven by the presence or absence of Barack Obama on the ballot, but the trend-lines are deeper than that, particularly in the South where Republicans are more feral and race is never completely absent from politics.

There’s another positive factor southern Democrats would generally note:

In any event, I would by no means write off the whole region for Senate Democrats. There’s this tendency to think of them as soft touches because they are not typically loud-and-proud progressives. But as southerners know, politics is a blood sport in the region, in part because partisan fights are often over very basic things like the existence of progressive taxes and public schools, not to mention crazy conservative memes like land-use planning being a UN plot. So while 2014 will be difficult for southern Democrats, they’re not going to lose by default.

Every time you turn around, some primary fight or rhetorical tussle involving Republicans is labeled a “civil war,” which typically inflates arguments over strategy and tactics into matters of deep principle (and also creates a misleading impression of “moderation” when less extreme strategy and tactics are adopted for the same ideological agenda).
At TPMCafe this week, I continued an ongoing critique of “phony wars” within the GOP, and noted one area where the not-so-friendly-fire is real:

The phony-war dynamics of intra-GOP disputes is apparent just under the surface on a remarkably wide range of topics. “Incrementalists” and “absolutists” on reproductive rights issues may battle over “personhood” initiatives or rape-and-incest exceptions or a general tendency to focus on relatively rare late-term abortions. But they all long for the day when abortion — broadly defined to include birth control methods they deem “abortifacients” — is entirely illegal, even if that’s via the route of first allowing states to keep abortion legal as it was prior to Roe v. Wade.
Similarly, some Republicans are embarrassed by the more aggressive tactics of gun advocates, such as allowing people to in churches, bars or on college campuses. But that doesn’t indicate significant willingness to support efforts to extend or even maintain gun regulation, despite massive public sentiment supporting it.
And to cite just one more example, advocates of radical “tax reform” proposals like the “Fair Tax” or the 9-9-9 scheme Herman Cain made famous may seem to diverge in a big way from Republicans focused on reducing capital gains taxes or the top income tax rate. But they all generally agree on making taxes more regressive and focused on income earned from labor rather than capital, and it’s hard to find a GOPer these days who shares Teddy Roosevelt’s advocacy of inheritance taxes.
Rare as real “battles of principle” within the GOP generally are, they do exist, though sometimes they are mixed up with strategic and tactical concerns. A significant if shrinking number of Republicans appear to be attached to comprehensive immigration reform as an end in itself, sometimes on libertarian or free-market grounds, sometimes as a matter of ensuring their business community allies and patrons a ready supply of affordable labor. More prominent lately have been strategic/tactical arguments based on fears of a demographic disaster if Republicans continue to alienate Latino voters. But at present, both principled and “pragmatist” advocates of comprehensive reform have been outgunned in the House GOP Caucus. Reform opponents, too, seem divided between principled nativists (or hard-core legalists) and pols just afraid of “base” hostility to amnesty, which may explain the popularity of “enforcement first” or legalization-without-citizenship positions which straddle the usual battle lines.
But if you want to see a real “civil war” work itself out, watch the rapidly developing fight over foreign policy and defense issues, in which Sen. Rand Paul’s 2016 presidential aspirations are very likely to be the first major casualty.
Paul has been very crafty in revamping without entirely abandoning his father’s non-interventionist foreign policy stance. His first smart step was to display allegiance to Israel, the linchpin of the contemporary conservative global scheme of friends and enemies (he was helped by the turmoil in the Arab world which enabled him to focus on opposition to U.S. assistance to Israel’s rivals rather than to Israel itself). But more generally he has framed his critique of American overseas commitments as attacks on Barack Obama’s diplomatic and military initiatives, very safe territory But as we learned the last week, Paul is exposed as a heretic whenever his positioning takes him beyond standard GOP Obama-bashing into the past or future.
The 2009 video of Paul suggesting that the 2003 Iraq War was in no small part the product of Dick Cheney’s concerns for Halliburton profits didn’t just anger hard-core neoconservative defenders of the nobility of that war. It also carried him well beyond the pale of acceptable criticism of GOP foreign policy and of the two-term elected GOP Vice President of the United States.

The backlash against Paul’s Iraq comments is well underway, and there’s little doubt the intent is to marginalize or even veto him as a viable presidential candidate. This is one civil war that will likely turn into a rout.

As part of a continuing effort to get Democrats focused on what they can and cannot do to deal with the problem of a midterm voting falloff by pro-Democratic demographic groups, let’s look at the particular issue posed by Hispanic voters. Using a new Pew study, here’s what I had to say today at Washington Monthly:

In 1986, the percentage of eligible Hispanic voters who turned out was 38%, as opposed to 46% of African-Americans and 51% of whites. By 1994, the gap between Hispanic and white turnout figures had increased to 17% (34% versus 51%), where it has almost exactly remained through 2010 (when Hispanic turnout was down to 31%, while white turnout was just under 49%).
The erosion of Hispanic turnout has been obscured, of course, by the steady growth of the eligible Hispanic voting population.
Now if you ask the average pundit about current or prospective Hispanic turnout problems, he or she will probably start talking about “discouragement’ over immigration legislation or conflicts between liberal economic views and conservative cultural views, or even language issues, and so on and so forth. But Pew points out one huge factor you don’t hear much about:

The relative youth of the Hispanic electorate has helped drive down the group’s overall turnout. In 2010, 31% of Hispanic eligible voters were under 30. By contrast, 19% of white, 26% of black and 21% of Asian eligible voters were under 30.

As noted here recently, under-30 voters are conspicuously and consistently prone to midterm falloff, for reasons that appear to have more to do with life status (particularly high geographical mobility and a generally low level of civil engagement) than with the issue landscape or the standing of this or that president or this or that party. So shouting “messages” at them via network television ads they mostly will not see doesn’t seem the most fruitful way to deal with the problem.
There is some potential turnout improvement associated with old-fashioned GOTV efforts enhanced by new technology. Consider this data nugget from Pew:

Nearly twice as many Hispanics as non-voters overall said they forgot to vote, 13.3% to 7.5%.

You have to figure the DSCC’s 60-million dollar GOTV initiative this year ought to be able to drive that number down dramatically.

In a column for TPMCafe today, I continued to beat the drum for a clearer understanding of the turnout problem faced by Democrats this midterm cycle, and for a more rational assessment of the limits and uses of “base enthusiasm,” which some Democrats (and Republicans) often discuss with mystic intensity.

We’re at that time of the election cycle when you start hearing a great deal about the relative “enthusiasm” of each major party’s “base,” with the assumption being this is the key to a robust turnout in November. Do this and don’t do that, we are told (especially by conservative Republicans, but increasingly as well by progressive Democrats), or you will dampen base enthusiasm and court disaster.
But there are a couple of problems with this assumption, namely (1) “enthusiasm” does not reward the base voter with additional trips to the ballot box, and (2) there are quite a few factors other than “enthusiasm” that affect turnout rates….
Now a lot of Democratic progressives claim that a party message more focused on the perceived interests or ideological leanings of marginal voters (i.e., a “populist” message) will produce much higher turnout. That’s based on the assumption that non-voting is mainly attributable to “voter discouragement,” rather than to longstanding demographic patterns of participation. It’s fair to wonder if those making this claim are projecting their own attitudes onto marginal voters, and/or simply prefer a different message (an entirely legitimate desire, but not one inherently relevant to turnout).
But in any event, there’s plenty of evidence that turnout can be more reliably affected by direct efforts to identify favorable concentrations of voters and simply get them to the polls, with or without a great deal of “messaging” or for that matter enthusiasm (no one takes your temperature before you cast a ballot). Such get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are the meat-and-potatoes of American politics, even if they invariably get little attention from horse-race pundits. Neighborhood-intensive “knock-and-drag” GOTV campaigns used to be a Democratic speciality thanks to the superior concentration of Democratic (especially minority) voters, though geographical polarization has created more and more equally ripe Republican areas.
In recent years, however, technology has made it increasingly feasible to use voter-to-voter contacts to expand and intensify marginal-voter outreach (pioneered by the Bush re-election campaign in 2004, which used email chains and informal civic connections to conduct “under the radar” GOTV efforts, and then raised to another level via social media by the Obama re-election campaign of 2012). And that’s where “enthusiasm” really might play a role. Perhaps highly “energized” base voters don’t get a personal ballot bonus. But if they are motivated to contact those who otherwise might not vote at all, their “enthusiasm” can be usefully harvested.

While there is nothing wrong with “enthusiasm,” a message-driven hyper-polarized approach to GOTV can sometimes help the other side increase its own “enthusiasm.” Better to chose the message most in accord with the party’s policy goals and enjoying the most public support, and use “enthusiasm” in synch with investments in technology to reach and get to the polls as many voters as possible.