EARLY WARNING SYSTEM — After this week’s break in the primary calendar, seven states will hold elections on Tuesday. In the biggest of them, California, Democrats are already looking at some troubling early turnout numbers: So far, only about 2.2 million Californians have returned ballots. That’s less than a third of the total early vote at this point in California’s recall election last year.
Primary turnout is traditionally apoor indicator of general election turnout. But Paul Mitchell, a leading political data expert in California, says Democrats have reason to be concerned this year. Nightly spoke with Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc., which works with Democrats and in nonpartisan races, about what turnout can — and can’t — tell us about the state of the electorate nearly halfway through this midterm election year. This conversation has been edited. Why is early turnout so low in California? Voter registration is at a record high in California going back to like the 1910s. Mailing everybody a ballot is now statewide, post-Covid. All ballots can be mailed without even having a postage stamp. You don’t even have to mail your ballot. In a lot of areas, you’ll have campaigns calling supporters and offering to pick up their ballots. So, all the mechanical pieces are there to make voting easier. And we would expect that to either create higher turnout or at least create a higher floor, so that no matter how boring an election is, at least X percent of voters are going to vote. Why aren’t they? The election is just so damn boring. You’ve got statewide elections for governor on down that have a lot of candidates nobody’s ever heard of, outside of the obvious winners that we’re going see like Gavin Newsom. There’s not a lot of attention being paid to those races. It’s just not that interesting. There are no ballot measures. Locally, we would expect more enthusiasm because redistricting has kind of shook up the ant farm, and now we have new districts, new open seats. We’ve had this exodus from the Assembly where there are more open Assembly seats than we’ve seen in over a decade. So, there are some things afoot that would make you think, Hey, this is going to be an interesting election, but the voters just aren't buying it. Should Democrats be worried? At the top of the ticket, it probably doesn’t matter. I would expect the Democrats to be the top vote getters in all these statewide primary elections. And unless something goes awry, they’re probably all going to have easily beatable Republican opponents, and those races are not going to be competitive. Where Democrats do need to worry is those competitive congressional districts. California has a number of congressional districts that could be considered swing districts. If Democrats aren’t successful in reelecting Katie Porter and Mike Levin and Josh Harder and then maybe even picking up the Mike Garcia seat in North L.A. County or pushing Michelle Steel and that district to potentially either pick it up or maybe pick that up 2024 — that’s where macro-level turnout can make a big difference. If there’s nothing interesting on the statewide ballot in the 2022 general and voters aren’t enthusiastic, just like they are here now in this primary, then, in those kinds of elections, Republicans could win some of these seats. And the reason is that when turnout drops, it doesn’t drop evenly for all groups. It drops most precipitously for lower income, minorities, younger people. And suburban white affluent voters who are homeowners always stay relatively high turnout. And so, when the floor falls out on a low turnout election and you have those critical Democratic core groups voting at 18 percent turnout and core Republican groups voting at 70 percent turnout, then you have a recipe for disaster in those competitive congressional districts. So, should Democrats in Washington and elsewhere be freaking out? I think the question Democrats nationally need to be asking about California is, How do we make that election interesting to our voters? You look at Georgia — right now, Georgia’s having primary election turnout that’s through the roof. They don’t have the mechanical pieces that make voting easy in Georgia. But what they have is an enthusiasm around elections that are polarizing the electorate, getting them excited and getting them to turn out and vote. Democrats nationally need to be looking at California and saying, How do we kind of jolt the electorate into caring about this election cycle and turning out? All of this, for Democrats — going back to the last redistricting, to Republican control of the House, going to the Donald Trump success, all this stuff — it all started by Democrats not turning out in 2010. And Democrats not turning out in 2022 would be potentially just as catastrophic for the next decade. So 2022 could be a redux of 2010 and 2014 in terms of having these huge impacts. It’s one of these things where Democrats win an election in a presidential year, and then they sit on the couch in a gubernatorial and go, “Oh, you know, voting? I already did that.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at dsiders@politico.com on Twitter at @davidsiders.
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