Imagine, if you would, an election in which almost everyone turned out to vote. Campaigns would have to reorient their persuasion efforts, because they'd have to talk to everyone. It wouldn't matter whether it was a presidential year or a midterm year. All the time, money, and effort that goes into identifying potential voters, making sure they're registered, and then getting them to the polls would no longer be needed. And of course, people like me wouldn't be able to spend months talking about which voters were going to turn out and which ones weren't.
One of the most fundamental features of a midterm election like this one is that the electorate will be different from the one that comes out in a presidential year. It'll be older, whiter, and generally more Republican. While Republicans try to reinforce this difference, Democrats try to counteract it. The degree to which each succeeds determines the outcome, and if this year is like previous midterms, turnout will be around 40 percent, meaning that three out of five Americans who were eligible to vote never made it to cast a ballot. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Democrats are particularly concerned about whether black voters, the party's bedrock, will get out in sufficient numbers. Just look at what it takes to meet the challenge:
Sasha Issenberg, whose 2012 book, "The Victory Lab," explored the science of winning campaigns, said increasing turnout "is doable." But it is very expensive and time-consuming; on average, he said, a well-trained volunteer must have 14 contacts with prospective voters to produce one new vote.
Mr. Issenberg said his rough calculation showed that in Georgia alone, such an effort would cost $30 million. A national effort, he said, would be "resource-intensive on a scale that we've never seen executed in a midterm election."
Republicans are skeptical. "What the Democrats were able to pull off with African-American turnout in places like Ohio in 2012 was truly amazing," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. "Accomplishing the same goal without the African-American president on the ballot at the top of the ticket is a totally different endeavor."
Still, Democrats are trying. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has poured $60 million this year into its Bannock Street Project, a data-driven effort to target potential voters, then make sure they vote.
In North Carolina, where Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, is fighting to retain her seat, party field operatives have deputized more than 150 "captains" - the owners of black barbershops, hair salons and other small businesses - to help register voters. Nearly 30,000 African-Americans have registered since January.
In Georgia, where blacks make up 30 percent of registered voters, Democrats identified 600,000 unregistered black voters. The New Georgia Project, an officially nonpartisan effort founded by the Democratic leader of the State House, Stacey Abrams, has helped register about 120,000 voters. But the effort is under attack from the Republican secretary of state, who has not yet processed 40,000 of the applications - a move Ms. Abrams denounced as "voter suppression."
Mitch McConnell used to say, when arguing against efforts to make registering and voting easier, that "low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy," which was about as self-serving as the rest of his political beliefs. But in most other mature democracies, many of them quite content, turnout is far higher than it is here. That isn't to say we're uniquely bad, but many countries do much better than we do. Here's a chart of turnout in the OECD countries, which I made using this handy tool from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance:
That number for the United States is from the 2012 election. If you use voting-eligible population (VEP) instead of voting-age population (VAP) as your denominator (that removes those like non-citizens and prisoners from the pool), turnout in 2012 was 58 percent, which is a bit higher but still nothing to brag about.
While you may have heard that voting is mandated by law in Australia, which helps account for their place near the top of that list, it's also mandatory in a couple of dozen other countries, including Belgium, which tops this list. In some of those places the mandate for voting isn't really enforced, but in others you really will have to pay a fine or face some other kind of sanction if you don't vote. And it works.
You may find the idea to be a horrifying infringement on freedom, and if we were ever to do it here it would have to be accompanied by vast improvements in our voting system to make it much easier for everyone to cast ballots, even those who would just leave them blank out of protest. But wouldn't it be better if the question of who was going to turn out wasn't a part of our campaigns and the parties could just concentrate on persuading the public that their ideas were superior? We could obviously go a good way toward that goal if we did some practical things, like not holding elections on a weekday when people have to work. And then there's the fact that now more than ever before, we have one political party that is determined to make voting as difficult as possible, particularly for those unlikely to vote for them.
It's obviously in the Republican Party's interest to keep turnout low, and the fact that turnout is what it is in midterm elections is particularly critical to them maintaining what power they have. But it's worth considering just what an election without turnout concerns would be like. I'm not saying campaigns would suddenly turn into some kind of Athenian fantasy of high-mindedness. But it would probably be at least a little better, and if nothing else we'd be able to say that the choices that came out of the process represented the will of nearly all the people, however ill-informed or ill-considered that will might be. Which is more than we can say now.
