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.

It is reasonably clear by now that the report of the bipartisan “lines commission” set up by the President after the 2012 elections to facilitate voting opportunities is being rigorously ignored in Republican-controlled states where the “war on voting” rages on. Here’s my take at Washington Monthly today on the latest developments–and the ultimate solution.

The latest state to curtain early voting is, unsurprisingly, Wisconsin, as The Nation‘s Ari Berman reports:

Yesterday Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed legislation eliminating early voting hours on weekends and nights, when it’s most convenient for many voters to go to the polls. When they took over state government in 2011, Wisconsin Republicans reduced the early voting period from three weeks to two weeks and only one weekend. Now they’ve eliminated weekend voting altogether.
Over 250,000 Wisconsinites voted early in 2012, one in twelve overall voters. Cutting early voting has a clear partisan purpose: those who voted early voted for Obama 58 to 41 percent in Wisconsin in 2012, compared to his 51 to 48 percent margin on Election Day. Extended early voting hours were particularly critical with respect to high voter turnout in big cities like Milwaukee and Madison. “It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics,” said Wisconsin GOP State Senator Dale Schultz, a critic of the legislation.
Wisconsin Republicans are following their Ohio brethren in adopting this strategy:
A month ago, Ohio passed legislation cutting early voting by a week, eliminating same-day voter registration and restricting the availability of absentee ballots while Secretary of State Jon Husted issued a directive doing away with early voting on weeknights and Sundays as well. 600,000 Ohioans, ten percent of the electorate, voted early in 2012. The cuts in Ohio, like Wisconsin, have a clear partisan and racial underpinning–in Cleveland, for example, African-Americans made up 56 percent of those who voted on weekends in 2008.

It’s another sign, to me at least, of the folly of letting states and localities exercise so much control over the fundamental right of democratic participation. Of course conservatives who are prone to believe that evil liberal elites are buying votes by supporting government benefits for those people are going to utilize every lever they have for foiling the “plot.” But the rest of us don’t have to go along with it, and at some point we’re going to realize that nationalizing election procedures to the maximum constitutional extent is the only way to stop these franchise-reducing measures.

Democrats need to make the right to vote more than an occasional preoccupation in this or that state, but instead a constant, abrasive, national priority.

As regular readers of TDS know, a baleful reality facing Democrats this year is the abiding reality of “midterm falloff” among key Democratic constituencies, particular young and minority (and particularly Hispanic) voters. At Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball today, Geoffrey Skelley ran some numbers on the phenomenon for under-30 voters, and it makes for sobering reading. Here’s how I explained it at Washington Monthly:

According to Skelley’s numbers, the “midterm falloff” in the percentage of the electorate comprised of under-30 votes from the preceding presidential election was 9.5% in 1978, 8.0% in 1982, 7.8% in 1986, 6.3% in 1990, 7.6% in 1994, 3.7% in 1998, 5.7% in 2002, 4.4% in 2006, and 6.3% in 2010. You can say it’s not as bad lately as it once was, but it’s still mighty consistent. And at the same time, thanks to the aging of the Baby Boom generation, the percentage of the midterm electorate made up of over-60 voters has risen and then stayed high. In every midterm since 1994, over-60 voters have more than doubled under-30 voters as a percentage of the electorate. The gap in presidential years is vastly lower (as recently as 1992, under-30 voters still outnumbered over-60 voters).
As Skelley notes, the reasons for the age gap in midterms are not attributable to easy-to-change shortcomings in candidate or party messages:

[S]harply lower young voter participation in midterm elections is surely a trend that predates national exit polls. Older people are simply more likely to vote in general due to a number of lifestyle factors, such as buying a house, starting a family and becoming settled in a community. Even when the 18-to-29 cohort made up a plurality (30.4%) of the country’s adult population in 1980 (the last time that was true as the Baby Boomers got older), the 1982 midterm election saw an eight-point drop in that group’s portion of the electorate from the 1980 presidential election, falling from 22.9% to 14.9%.

There are, however, low-falloff years, such as 1998 (when Democrats broke the rules by making gains in a second-term midtern) and 2006 (when Democrats ran the table). Those should be the models for Democrats this year, when they depend on young voters more than at any time in memory.

With Senate Democrats in particularly suggesting that mitigating “midterm falloff” is their top priority, they have their work cut out for them.

The on-again, off-again debate among Democrats about the limits of party heterodoxy flared back up this week. I had some irenic thoughts about it at Washington Monthly.

Like a lot of intraparty political disputes, the protest filed by Third Way senior veeps Matt Bennett and Jim Kessler at Politico Magazine against Markos Moulitsas’ alleged effort to “fold up” the “big tent” of a Democratic Party is largely based on what might be charitably called a misunderstanding.
The fiery Big Orange Satan founder did a post the other day observing and celebrating the more progressive cast of Democratic Senators today as opposed to a decade ago. In passing he observed that he thought Mark Pryor would lose this year, and that Mary Landrieu might lose as well. He didn’t celebrate the replacement of either Democrat by a Republican, but generally suggested that for progressives a similar partisan balance in the Senate accompanied by a significantly more leftbent Democratic Caucus was a sign of progress since 2004.
Bennett and Kessler viewed this (from Kos’ perspective) reasonable assessment as a declaration of war on the idea of a “Big Tent” Democratic Party that could win seats in red states.

If we are to make progress in a divided Washington–and if we are to protect the Democratic Senate majority–we simply must embrace a big tent for the Democratic Party. Even in purple states, there are not enough self-identified liberals to elect Democrats without their winning significant pluralities or majorities of moderates. The idea that more liberal candidates could win in places like Arkansas, Indiana or Alaska is pure fantasy. And to write off those states would consign Democrats to long-term congressional minority status.

I didn’t see where Markos said “more liberal candidates” could win in places like Arkansas, Indiana or Alaska, or that such states should be written off. He simply said that for purposes of achieving progressive policy objectives, both partisanship and ideology are factors.
Now playing off the Third Way protest, Hullabaloo‘s David Atkins goes where Markos didn’t quite go, and argues that the kind of “economic populism” Third Way tends to dislike is exactly the kind of political message that can work in red states.

Attacking Wall Street…is excellent politics in conservative districts. Hammering against unrestricted bailouts and cocaine-freebasing, prostitute-expensing billionaire vulture capitalists in Manhattan makes for a compelling argument in rural Missouri. Taking broadsides against outsourcing, Cayman Islands tax havens and corporate welfare queens is a superb strategy in suburban Colorado. It was Democrats who ran on these and similar campaign themes who won against the odds in 2012. Most Americans, including in conservative districts, are strongly in favor of reducing income inequality, raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits.

Atkins seems to have in mind the 2012 Senate winners Heidi Heitkamp, Martin Henriech, and Jon Tester, who are not from Arkansas, Indiana or Alaska (I’m guessing he’s not a big fan of Indiana’s Sen Joe Donnelly). I don’t know if progressives would generally agree that, say, the support of Heitkamp and Tester for the Keystone XL pipeline is entirely consistent with an “economic populist” position of brave opposition to the corporate Man. And for that matter, Third Way supports both a minimum wage increase and extended unemployment benefits. So some of his argument seems a bit off. But he’s right that Third Way totems like free trade tend to be very unpopular in southern and midwestern red states.
But if “economic populism” is such a big potential winner for red state Democrats, why isn’t it deployed more often, particularly in the South (Lord knows Louisiana has a tradition of this kind of politics)? Is it a corporate conspiracy? Would Mary Landrieu really foreswear any winning message that might save her seat? Would Kay Hagan?
Truth is, progressive disgruntlement with “conservadems” is as often about disagreement over cultural issues as it is about economics, so there’s nothing inherently progressive about elevating one set of issues over another, as Atkins seems to do. And so long as the U.S. Senate is set up as it is, with its anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) tilt and internal rules, it’s inevitable that Democrats will need a broader coalition than Republicans to gain and hold a working majority.
So the Third Way folk are right about the need for a Big Tent, and wrong about accusing Markos of trying to “fold” it. And Atkins is right that a simple “move to the center” strategy for red state Democrats could foreclose successful messages, but perhaps wrong in suggesting “economic populism” is either a cure-all or a general point of fracture in the party (associating Third Way’s investment-banker-heavy board of directors with the views of Democratic “centrists” generally–or in some cases with Third Way’s own positions–isn’t really fair or accurate).
In the end I mainly want to defend Markos’ sorting out of what goes in to an assessment of political “progress:” it involves both policy goals and the political assets necessary to achieve them.

This year, right now, though, I doubt there’s any disunity on the desire that all Democratic Senate campaigns pull through to victory, grudging as the respect may be in some circles for candidates who help form a majority but make governing difficult.

The argument over the current status of the Tea Party–is it dying, winning, or something in between?–rages on, pointing to some elements of confusion over how one measures the success of a political movement. Here’s how I addressed it today at Washington Monthly:

For hardly the first time, but with greater conviction than ever, there’s a big media meme this week that the apparent weakness of right-wing primary challengers to Republican senators means the Tea Party Movement has finally run its course and the Republican Establishment is fully back in the saddle again. Josh Kraushaar makes this judgment by looking at the support garnered by the GOP primary challengers. Molly Ball comes to the same conclusion by focusing on the ability of GOP congressional leaders to head off Tea Party-led kamikaze missions.
But at The Federalist Ben Domenech reminds the obituarists that you judge the power of a political movement not just by horse-race victories or even legislative battles, but by its influence over its targets. And by that measure, the Tea Party Movement has come a very long way since Santelli’s Rant:

The Tea Party’s success is not gauged by primaries alone. It’s gauged by how much the Tea Party’s priorities become the Republican Party’s priorities.
The Tea Party’s impact in primaries is largely about putting fear into establishment candidates, whether they knock them off or not.
It took them two cycles, but the traditional Republican establishment took the right lessons from the Bennett and Lugar losses. Orrin Hatch spent 2011-12 voting lockstep with Mike Lee. Primary threats made Mike Enzi part of the organizing group for the defund push. Pat Roberts is doing his best to don the winger apparel. Lindsey Graham is trying like mad to re-establish his conservative credentials. Thad Cochran is the exception that proves the rule: it’s no accident that a traditional Washington appropriator who hasn’t modified his ways is the most vulnerable GOP Senator this cycle. So if establishment Republicans understand that they are vulnerable in primaries, and have to pretend to be Tea Partiers when they’re in cycle, is that a sign that the Tea Party is dead – or a sign that it’s had a significant political impact?
Within the realm of Senate primaries, there’s not as clear-cut of a field of candidates this time in the challenger side with appropriators on one side and strong limited government types on the other (see Nebraska, where Tea Party folks are split between Sasse and Osborn). And the story hasn’t been finalized in North Carolina or Georgia. But even considering the relatively narrow issue of primaries, it’s clear that establishment guys who run as establishment guys lose: their path to winning is to appeal to the Tea Party, champion opposition to Obamacare, hoist the musket and run as right-wingers. Is the fact Mitch McConnell is winning his primary today because of Rand Paul a sign of Tea Party weakness? I think not.
This also speaks to the generational point, where we see Tea Partiers elected to lower level offices rise to take more prominent positions, backed by a new infrastructure of groups which can offset traditional fundraising routes.

These are precisely the points I tried to make in responding to the “death of the Tea Party” assessments of the Texas primary earlier this month. The gap between conventional conservative Republicans and the Tea Folk has always been exaggerated; it’s mainly a matter of strategy and tactics rather than ideology or policy. Even on strategy and tactics, the “Establishment” has mainly tamped down Tea Party demands for fiscal confrontations by adopting the Tea Folk obsessions with Obamacare and the pseudo-scandals involving the IRS and Benghazi! (now extended to an indictment of Obama’s “weakness” and anti-American instincts with respect to Ukraine). And if you look at actual primary elections, Senate “Establishment” victories–which many are proclaiming before they actually occur–are being achieved by vast concessions to the conservative activist “base,” which in turn is doing very well down-ballot.

Just because the Tea Party didn’t succeed in creating a 2014 government shutdown or may not knock off Lindsey Graham, it should by no means be adjudged as unsuccessful or even in decline. But beyond the debate over the Tea Party, it’s worth remembering that every viable political movement has multiple objectives can that usually be achieved in multiple ways.

There’s been a lot of questionable spin over the results in Tuesday’s special congressional election in the 13th District of Florida, which Republican David Jolly won over Democrat Alex Sink by just under 3500 votes. GOPers naturally want to make it out as a “referendum on Obamacare,” and some Democrats seem to agree that an “enthusiasm gap” partially attributable to Obamacare was the key.
But that’s not what I concluded at Washington Monthly:

One thing that the FL-13 special election results should encourage everyone to do is to get very serious about the phenomenon I write about metronomically here: the “midterm falloff problem” for Democrats.
We don’t have exit polls for FL-13, so we can’t figure out exactly who turned out and who didn’t. But the total vote falloff from 2012 was 46%. It was even 21% from 2010, which reminds us that special elections are kind of super-midterms when it comes to participation levels. Given the eternal proclivity of younger and minority voters who now heavily lean D to vote more in presidential than in non-presidential contests, it’s pretty hard to believe that wasn’t the most important reason why Alex Sink ran behind Barack Obama’s 2012 percentages in the district….
In the last good midterm election for Democrats, 2006, the Donkey Party broke even among voters over 65, who represented 19% of the electorate. Democrats narrowly lost white voters (47-51), who represented 79% of the electorate. Two years later, Obama’s overall solid win masked the fact that Democrats lost over-65 voters by eight points, while their deficit among white voters increased from 4 to 12 points. These demographic categories quite naturally declined as a percentage of the electorate (seniors from 19% to 16%; whites from 79% to 74%).
So the cataclysm of 2010 was largely a matter of Democrats continuing to lose vote share among seniors (a deficit of 21 points) and white voters generally (a 23 point deficit), who again made up a higher proportion of the electorate (seniors: 21%, whites: 77%). In 2012, the Democratic vote share rebounded somewhat among seniors and white voters (12 points and 20 points, respectively), but the more important factor is that their share of the vote declined significantly (old folks and white folks each down 5 points).
I could go on for quite some time with such numbers, but the point is that the two electorates, midterm and presidential, pretty clearly have two “natural” majorities based on vote share and participation rates. And changing that won’t be easy, for either party.

Senate Democrats are reportedly making a reduction in “midterm falloff” their major collective task going into the general election. That’s a very good thing, and as the narrow margin of GOP victory in FL-13 indicates, not at all a hopeless task.