The circular firing squads use the historically low turnout to blame each other while failing to understand what truly drives turnout. What is true and what sparks Democratic/Progressive victories is high turnout. This everybody agrees upon. The incorrect presumption is that low turnout is caused by being too close to the President or too far away or having a Progressive message or a Moderate one. From my crunching of the numbers NONE of this is true. More wonky goodness below the orange squiggle.
Let's start by looking at the 2014 turnout numbers focusing on my home state of Colorado.
The average turnout was 36.6%. Colorado had the fourth highest turnout at 52.4%. Senator Udall had a large machine working on improving turnout of which I was a part. This appears to help but only at the margins. 2010 turnout was 51.7%.
But, what did turnout look like in Presidential years? It was 71.6% in 2008 and 70.7% in 2012.
Why does Colorado have a high relative turnout to other states given its purple state status? Two factors stick out.
1. Candidates running for high(er) office.
2. Contestedness of the race.
What drives turnout is not motivation or ideology but what I call "relevance". Simply put, voting for President in a swing state is more "relevant" than voting for dog catcher in a non-swing state.
As I noted above our vaunted GOTV efforts only get us a couple of percent at the margins. But, what we need for victory is double-digit changes in voting behavior. Which gets me to our plan of action. Before there is a candidate for President organize our base LOCALLY NOW. Get involved with Ready for Hillary the School Board President. When I was a Republican we knew the importance of local elections. This year I left about 6 contests blank on my ballot because there was only a Republican choice.
Tip O'Neill and Howard Dean understood this truth and as Tip put it, "All politics is local." My morph of that is the following,
All elections are relevant.