We hear it again and again - 2012 will be a turnout election. Yup, just like all the ones before it.
In 2008, 132,618,000 Americans voted (56.8% of the voting-age population). The country elected the first black President, gave Democrats a 60 vote majority in the US Senate (albeit tardily) and expanded the Democratic majority in the House by 21 seats.
Two years later, turnout plummeted to 90,683,000 (37.8% of the voting-age population). The U.S. lurched from the landslide presidential election of 2008 to an off-year "wave election" in 2010 that was a tsunami. Republicans gained 63 seats in the House, "the largest shift in partisan preference since the elections of 1946 and 1948," according to The Almanac of American Politics. And with a six seat gain in the Senate, the GOP got more than the 40 votes it needed to block virtually everything it disliked. (As well as the ability to block a lot of legislation previously sponsored by the GOP's faithful.)
Of course, overall turnout doesn't explain everything. By itself, it might not explain much of anything. But who shows up to vote is illuminating and vital to election strategizing.
US demographics are shifting. The Center for American Progress follows the composition of the electorate. From its Path to 270: "[R]ising percentages of communities of color, single and highly educated women, Millennial generation voters [16 to 29 year olds], secular voters, and educated whites living in more urbanized states or more urbanized parts of states - clearly favors Democrats ..." That's the ideology of modern politics, that these "minorities" should be more liberal.
Electorate math seems to buttress that conclusion. Increasing proportions of "minority" voters means decreasing proportions of white voters, a shift that potentially diminishes GOP support more than the Democrats. As explained by NBC News directors Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser in How Barack Obama Won, their "State-By-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election:"
" ... the majority of [Barack Obama's] support came from white voters. Sixty-one percent of his supporters were white, 23% were African-American and 11% were Hispanic. In contrast, 90% of John McCain's supporters were white.
[in 2008], there were fewer white voters to win or lose. This is a huge potential problem for the GOP especially if you consider that in 1976, only one in ten voters was not white, 10% In 2008, one in four voters was non-white, 26%, and guess what, the white vote isn't enough to power the GOP.
Obama did as well among white voters as any previous Presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976, when 47% of whites cast their vote for the Democrat. In 2008, 43% of white voters nationwide voted for Obama, while McCain won 55% of the white vote.
Apart from whites under 30, McCain won a majority of every other age group of white voters." (emphasis added)
So what happened in 2010? A lot of people stayed home on Election Day, 42 million compared to 2008. And more of those who did show up voted Republican.
Age and gender were the two major factors that account for most of what happened in 2010. (That is, if you believe exit polls which, for electorate analysis, alas, we must.)
Young, relatively new voters were the biggest single crowd to dropout in 2010. "In 2008, polls showed that young people were overwhelmingly supportive of Obama and the Democrats. And they turned out in droves ... 51% of 18-to-19-year-olds voted that year. In 2010, polls showed that young people were still supportive ... But only 20.9% of them bothered to vote," according to the Washington Post's John Nichols. Yes, but ... as Todd and Gawiser point out, the youth share of the vote was 18% in 2008, only 1% more than in 2004. In 2008, "if no one under the age of 30 had voted, Obama would have won every state he carried with the exception of two: Indiana and North Carolina." And even more telling is the comparison between the last two off-Presidential election years, 2006 with 2010, where the percentage of voters among the 18-29 cohort is the same, at 12% of the electorate. Even so, even if young people did not actually swing many states, it was their feet-on-the-ground support as well as the sheer bigger number of their votes that was important in 2008 and dramatically minimized in 2010.
The story is different at the other end of age brackets, those 65 and older. While the proportion that seniors were of the electorate was pretty close in 2010 (at 21%) to 2006 (at 22%), 2010 saw a huge Who shift - who seniors voted for. According to Nonprofit Vote's report America Goes to the Polls 2010, seniors favored Republicans 58% to 38% in 2010, where in 2006, they voted for Democrats 50% to 48%.
So there was a double whammy in 2010. Millennials sat the election out and seniors shifted. As Pew research indicates, individuals over 65 hold relatively conservative views on social issues and the role of government. "Their growing unease, and even anger, about the direction of the country in recent years has moved them further toward the GOP, largely erasing the Democratic Party’s advantage in affiliation."
The results in 2010 weren't due entirely to younger/older demographics. Exit polls showed women - 55% of whom voted for Democrats in 2006 - favored Democrats only barely in 2010, at 49-48%. And whites as a whole - who were 51% to 47% for the GOP in 2006, went 60% to 38% for Republicans in 2010 in a turnout that was three percentage points higher than it was in the 2008 presidential year. With these shifts occurring, relatively minor falloffs in minority turnout undercut the advantage they historically provide for Democrats.
So, what's ahead for 2012?
Republicans are more conservative than Democrats are liberal. In "Obstacle Course - Obama and the 2012 Electoral Landscape," Will Marshall highlights the ratio of conservatives to liberals: " ... whereas there used to be 1.5 conservatives for every liberal in America, in 2012 the ratio is nearly 2:1. The new arithmetic doesn't mean Democrats are doomed; it does mean that they will have to do exceptionally well among moderates to win." His telling conclusion: "Republicans are a lot more conservative than Democrats are liberal. ... While liberal Republicans have practically become extinct, fully a fifth of Democrats still identify as conservatives."
Who's in The Middle? "[M]ost independents," Marshall argues, "tend to lean to one party or the other. As a group, they've become more conservative in the last several years, and Gallup says more leaners incline today toward Republicans than Democrats, resulting in an even 45-45 partisan split. Genuinely unaffiliated voters make only about 10-15 percent of the electorate." "Leaning", of course, does not mean committed, but still ...
And it is no accident, obviously, that those targeted for voter suppression efforts in GOP-dominant states and in areas elsewhere, are the very groups expected to favor Democrats. The GOP gang in Iowa and Maine can't seem to count straight with its own voters and its own processes. Nevertheless, the Grand Old Party is positively transfixed about stopping voter fraud in the upcoming general election.
Stay tuned. Coming this weekend ... Part II.