First of all, we might demand higher editorial standards from the Politico than we do from Wikipedia. How many analysts do you need to justify the ambiguous phrase "some analysts," because this article only mentions one analyst disenchanted by GOTV. And as we all learned this year, the title "analyst" might as well be "man on the street" considering how freely the cable networks hand out this honor.
But back to the vote: First, the article acknowledges that 2004 saw the highest turnout since the 60s. Then the article acknowledges that there were 6.5 million more registered voters in 2008 than in 2004. But the author writes that "despite widespread predictions of record voter turnout," Obama was only able to motivate a proportion larger than an already historically large proportion of an even larger total electorate to go to the polls. Confused?
Voter turnout as a percentage of the registered population is up by about 1% (pending official totals). 1% of 208.3 million registered voters is 2.08 million more voters. If that doesn't sound like a lot, consider that Obama focused his investments on battleground. Do we have any doubt that GOTV made the difference in Indiana, North Carolina, and Omaha? And furthermore GOTV probably gave Obama comfortable enough margins to avoid recount scenarios in Florida and Ohio.
But also keep in mind that Obama is not responsible for overall turnout. Obama is responsible for turning out voters voting for him. Currently Obama has 6.4 million more votes than Kerry (this number will increase), while McCain has about 4.6 million less than Bush.
So does our vaunted "Democratic analyst" still want to call the GOTV effort a failure? I think the blame for "only" 6 million more people turning out to vote should be laid at the feet of the team of mavericks, who clearly failed to inspire.
I now realize that this post has much the same message as yesterday's diary about David Brook's attempts to cast this election as a mandate for a center-right administration. We have to be vigilant in policing the media as they try to establish conventional wisdom, and it is clear to me that the CW regarding the failure of GOTV is both statistically lacking and damaging to Democratic morale. The subtext here is that the millions of dollars we donated and the months of time we volunteered to the campaign had no effect on November 4th's results. The message is to stay home and not take out our checkbooks in 2010 and 2012. For me, the numbers 365-173 speak for themselves.
The Venerable Lede. News. Politics. Empirics.
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