The surprise upset victory of congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over Democratic leader Joe Crowley has sparked a fresh round of speculation about who is or is not energized and ready to vote in the lead-up to the 2018 elections. While turnout in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District was still fairly low at less than 12 percent of registered Democrats, the race nonetheless showed that, in at least this case, victory could be assembled out of “drop-off” voters who tend not to participate in much of anything besides big presidential year general elections.
Democrats will often note that their voters are fired up, ready to turn out, and highly energized ahead of the midterms. They will point, for instance, to things like high turnout in Democratic primaries or Democrats telling pollsters that they are fired up. Republicans, meanwhile, hope that progressive overreach or the fight over the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy will remind their base of the stakes involved in potentially losing control of Congress and ensure even Republicans who are unenthused with Trump will still turn out.
All evidence suggests that Republican voters are just about as motivated to vote as they usually are, which in recent years has been enough to ensure them sweeping victories. But if Democrats can truly motivate their less-reliable voters to care, and to show up, in an election where they usually stay home, they have a chance to blunt the GOP’s advantage and perhaps make some gains.
There are a few ways researchers can measure enthusiasm. One commonly used metric is interest in an election; rather than asking someone to guess their own future likelihood to vote, by asking someone how interested they currently are in an election, you can gauge who is or isn’t tuned in. Of course, it’s possible for someone to be tuning out the news and to still turn out to vote out of basic civic obligation or habit, but ideally you want more people on your side to be thinking about the upcoming election.
On this measure, Democrats have reason to be cautiously optimistic. Asked to rate their interest in the upcoming elections on a 10-point scale, 63 percent of Democrats rate their interest level as a “9 or 10”, while only 47 percent of Republicans do the same. (In 2014, these numbers were essentially flipped, with Republicans holding the advantage.) However, when the question is instead framed as “how closely are you following news about the elections,” the partisan advantage vanishes, with supporters of both parties equally likely to say they are closely following the news, according to a survey by Pew Research Center.
There are also a variety of questions that ask people to rate their own excitement about the election as compared to their usual level of excitement. This question has tended to be indicative of what is to come in the election later that year; in 2010 and 2014, Republicans outpaced Democrats in terms of being more excited than usual, while in 2006, Democrats held a significant advantage on that question. In 2018, Pew finds a small gap on this question in favor of the Democrats, while other pollsters have found the gap much wider.
Republican voters were pretty fired up in 2014, so for them to say they are only about as enthusiastic as usual isn’t a bad sign. In order for Democrats to have a prayer, they need much more enthusiasm than they had four years earlier.
Furthermore, Republicans can survive a modest enthusiasm gap, in part because their coalition is now built around demographic groups that more reliably vote. The gap in party preference between the old and the young is a yawning gulf, with the young — especially young women — breaking for Democrats by extremely significant margins, while Republicans fare well with seniors.
And in off-year or midterm elections, voter turnout drops and “low-propensity voters” tend to fall away. In 2014, less than 37 percent of eligible voters turned out, and among voters under age 30, turnout was only about one in five. Young people are well-represented among that “low-propensity” group, while seniors are very reliable and typically have decades of voting history that has been habit-forming. Old people don’t need to be enthusiastic to vote; young people do.
A vote cast enthusiastically counts the same as a vote cast begrudgingly. If the Democrats telling pollsters they are extra fired-up are all usually reliable voters who just happen to be really, extra, super mad this time around, that may mute the actual electoral impact of any enthusiasm gap. But where an enthusiasm advantage helps is if it has spread beyond a party’s hardcore base and out to voters who tend to not show up in off-year or midterm elections, and some evidence from election results in the last few months suggests that might be what is happening.
Republicans, for what it’s worth, do not have an “enthusiasm problem” with their own voters, per se. In the Virginia gubernatorial race late last year, compared to a previous midterm baseline, Republican turnout was exactly what you would expect by modeling out voters’ likelihood to vote. Republican voters don’t seem to be depressed, per se. Instead, Democrats are seeing higher-than-expected turnout, with an especially wide gap in turnout among those who don’t normally participate in nonpresidential elections.
Close your eyes and imagine the “Resistance” and in your mind. It may look like someone in a pink knit cap holding a protest sign at a rally. But the election in 2018 will be decided more by whether or not that young voter who never much paid attention to politics before and who doesn’t go to protests and isn’t glued to cable news who decides that maybe, this time, it’s worth their time to go cast a vote.
Turning out low-propensity voters is one of the hardest things a campaign can try to do. It’s a tall order for the Democrats. But the polls show that if it was ever going to be possible to turn out these low-propensity voters, this might be the year.
