Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images
Signs at a campaign event at the Liacouras Center in Philadelphia, August 6, 2024
As polls show the 2024 presidential race stubbornly close despite the unity and euphoria on display at the Democratic National Convention, many progressives have taken comfort from the knowledge that a big variable that accounted for Democratic success in 2018, 2020, and 2022 was turnout. Demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic when they vote at all, such as young people and African Americans, turned out in larger-than-usual numbers in those three elections because of the terror of Trumpism.
Early polls, such as those that keep showing a nail-biter of an election, are lousy at capturing the turnout variable. So maybe turnout will save us. Or maybe not.
Yesterday, I published a column on various aspects of voter suppression. One of the respected voting experts whom I quoted, Justin Levitt, startled me with the observation that the usual premise that high turnout tends to help Democrats may be wrong in the Trump era. Trump, he said, was also boosting turnout substantially in the MAGA base, which otherwise stays home out of disaffection with politicians generally.
But what’s the net-net? On balance, which party does a high-turnout election help more? For insights, I turned to the best-informed student of maximizing turnout I know, Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO. Podhorzer’s extensive recent piece, “A Cure for Turnout Terror,” is still the authoritative research paper on the subject.
As the data show, Podhorzer reminded me, turnout was indeed up in the last three elections. And while it was also up among Trumpers, on balance it favored Democrats, especially in swing states and districts.
“For the last three cycles, Podhorzer said, “the success of the anti-MAGA majority has depended on historically high turnout and lopsided opposition [to Trump] from young voters and voters of color—the demographics Biden had lost the most ground with in polls.” Harris will presumably get these back, and then some.
So I got back in touch with Levitt. Did you get it wrong, I asked, or is there some way in which you and Podhorzer are both right? His answer, in an email, was illuminating:
“Mike’s data show that at the end of the day, more low-propensity voters turned out for Democrats, particularly in those three elections. But the tally of voters who voted aren’t a random sample of the total low-propensity electorate. In particular, the data aren’t good at parsing whether more low-propensity voters were Democrats, or Democrats were better at helping/encouraging/motivating their low-propensity voters to vote.”
In other words, as a political science-y point, there are low-propensity voters on both sides. But whether they actually vote is not just a passive variable. It depends on the relative success of both parties in persuading their potential electorate to vote.
So mobilizing low-propensity voters will indeed be key to a Democratic victory in 2024. We don’t yet know whether all the energy and enthusiasm on display at the convention will trickle down to motivating actual voters. We do know that, other things being equal, there is more of a potential upside among low-propensity Democratic voters than among their Republican counterparts.
We also know that the excitement at the convention is a great motivator for the organizers who do the actual work of persuading people to register and then to vote. And we know that the Democratic grassroots registration and get-out-the-vote infrastructure is better than its MAGA counterpart.
Of course, we won’t know what difference this will make in practice until much later in the fall, when we start to see more registration statistics and when we get reports on vote-by-mail and on-the-ground organizing. This will begin to show up in the polls only slowly.
All of this knowledge is far from conducive to sound sleep, and it should motivate Democrats to work as never before. But it’s far too early to be panicking.
