Democrats' biggest challenge is getting their base voters to vote

kos for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday September 25, 2013 · 1:00 PM PDT

2013/09/25 · 13:00

no image description available — If our people turnout, we win, but in midterm elections that's easier said than done.

Voters stand in line to cast their ballot at Hartford City Hall during the U.S. presidential election in Hartford, Connecticut, November 6, 2012. REUTERS/Michelle McLoughlin

If our people turnout, we win, but in midterm elections that's easier said than done.

As I noted post-Colorado recalls:

If our people turnout, we win. But our people don't like to vote, and Republicans will do everything in their power to encourage that non-participation.

It really is that simple, but that's easier said than done given the poor historical mid-term participation of our strongest-performing base groups: African Americans, Latinos, Asians, young voters, and single women. Let's look at those groups individually:

African Americans

Pew Research chart of turnout rates among ethnic and racial demographics.

Looking at that chart, we see that in 2012, African American voter participation rates were actually higher than those of whites. And the gains have steadily increased even before 2008, so it wasn't merely a matter of having Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. Decades of community engagement registering and educating African Americans about the power of the vote seem to have paid off. So mission accomplished, right!

No, because the problem with our base turnout isn't necessarily in presidential years, but in the off years in between. That means not just the midterm elections, but all sorts of local and special elections scattered in between those four-year big ones. Just look at the difference in voter turnout, by race and ethnicity, in this Census Bureau chart:

Bar graph showing how white turnout is higher during midterm elections than African American, Latino, and Asians.

The holy grail of Democratic electoral performance is to have all those groups match white turnout in mid-term elections. African Americans are the closest to that goal, but still lag, giving Republicans a demographic advantage every election outside of presidential ones.

We'll take a look at Latinos and Asians, youth voters, and single women below the fold.

Latinos and Asians

Latino turnout numbers are brutal:

[N]ew Census Bureau data show that Hispanics’ turnout rate—just 48%—was far below that of whites (64.1%) or blacks (66.2%). It also fell nearly two percentage points below the Hispanic turnout rate in 2008, which was 49.9%. Because of population growth, the number of Latinos who voted for president increased by about 1.4 million from 2008 to 2012, to a record 11.2 million, but the number of Latinos who were eligible but chose not to vote increased even more—by 2.3 million—from 9.8 million in 2008 to 12.1 million in 2012.

In 2012, Latino turnout numbers were actually below those of 2008. That's what deporting their family and friends at record pace apparently does. But even more alarming are those mid-term turnout numbers—not only are they the lowest of these groups tracked, and significantly so, they are also trending down. Asians are in much the same boat.

Much of that can be attributed to the large immigrant growth of both those communities, concentrated in the nation's lower socioeconomic levels which, of course, correlates to lower voter participation. For example, in 1992 a bigger percentage of the Latino population was higher-income Cubans, which are the highest performing Latino voting demographic.

Young voters

Not only do youth voter participation rates lag that of more reliably Republican seniors, but they do so by a crazy amount. And in 2012, their numbers dropped from 2008, hinting at potential problems moving forward.

But again, those problems are exacerbated in midterm elections. Voters under the age of 30 were 19 percent of all voters in 2012, but just 12 percent in 2010. This disparity can be seen even more clearly in this graph put together by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report:

Graph showing much wider age voting disparities in mid-term elections over presidential years.

Democrats have to figure out a way to narrow that mid-term gap because it's killing us.

Single women

Single women, no matter how they got single (never married, divorced, widowed) are among the most Democratic—delivering 67 percent of their votes to Obama in 2012. Yet as can be seen above, their turnout consistently lags that of the rest of the voter pool by about 10 points. Part of that is likely from overlap with youth voters (which is also a factor in Latino and Asian turnout numbers, since the median age of an American Latino is 18). But regardless, it's a problem.

And as with the other base Democratic groups, turnout falters even further in midterm elections.

Unmarried women have a midterm retention of 70%, but everyone else has a midterm retention of 78%

This is what Democrats face heading into the 2014 elections. If our people turn out, Democrats win. There are simply more of us than them, and that number is growing by the day. The problem is, our people are the least likely to turn out, and their track record in mid-term elections is woeful.

That's why Republican disenfranchisement efforts are so successful—our core groups are already predisposed to skip out on voting, it doesn't take that much of an extra push to guarantee their non-participation.

Democrats' biggest challenge is getting their base voters to vote

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