Turn Out the Voters, or Turn Out the Lights

There are basically two ways to improve the electoral performance of a party - in other words, to win an election. The first of these is to persuade voters to vote for your party. The second is to persuade more of the voters who are already persuaded to vote for your party, but who would not vote without the extra prod of some “turnout” effort, to show up and vote. This much, you don’t have to read this blog to know. For some time, the strategy of the Alabama Democratic Party has been centered on the former. Efforts to do the latter have historically been limited to localized efforts in the African-American community.

The typical Democratic campaign of recent years has consisted of collecting large sums of money from a small handful of groups: AEA, the plaintiff’s bar (i.e., “trial lawyers”), that part of the gaming industry that prefers creating jobs in Alabama to creating jobs in Mississippi, and to a lesser extent organized labor. This money was then spent - not always effectively - mostly on television ads for individual candidates. While we did do some effective negative campaigning, which has been shown to be effective by both professional experience and academic studies, most of our negative was focused on individual Republican candidates. In the meantime, our better-financed opposition added a generous dose of “party negative” to their mix, painting every Democrat as an abortion-supporting, gay-loving, God-hating, gun-seizing acolyte of the conservative bete noir of the cycle. This was, of course, reinforced by channels other than paid media, such as talk radio and thousands of “apolitical” pulpits and “Christian voter guides.” Whatever its merits (and I have written elsewhere about the need for party-based positive and negative media), this has clearly been a persuasion-oriented strategy.

Beginning in the 1990’s, and culminating in the 2010 loss of the Legislature and every statewide race, this strategy became less and less effective. Not only has the strategy been shown to be ineffective, it is becoming increasingly impossible to maintain. The Legislature has shown that it is determined to frustrate AEA’s constitutional right to collective political action by any means necessary, and we can no longer count on their historical level of financial support. The plaintiff’s bar has been victimized by a decade of Republican Supreme Court control. When the Alabama Supreme Court says it’s OK for a corporation to make a deadly product without paying damages, or for a bank to lie about its loans and investments, those lawyers don’t collect judgments. From those judgments come their fees, and from those fees their historic support. To the extent these lawyers have tried to hedge their bets by contributing to Republicans, they have been rewarded with ... more “tort reform.” As to the gaming industry, we all know what’s happened there.

This is the point at which we have to ask ourselves whether we Alabama Democrats have a turnout problem that has contributed to our electoral reversals. There are several ways to answer this question. “Yes.” “Si.” “Ja.” “Oui.” “Да.”

In my last post, I looked at some of the margins in the 2010 Alabama House races. Here, I want to shift perspective to the total vote turnout in each of the 105 districts, and compared it to the Republican percentage of the vote in each district. The results are reflected in this chart:



This chart shows a compelling correlation between the total number of votes cast, and the percentage of the vote taken by the Republican candidate. The two trendlines representing the figures for the contested races stand, taken together, at almost a perfect-correlation 45º angle.

Keep in mind, this chart is showing total vote, not percentage of registered or eligible voters voting, on the Y axis. Varying rates of voter registration, or shifts in population between the 2000 Census on which the 2010 districts were based, could produce a slightly different result. However, low registration rates are just as indicative of an organizational problem as low turnout rates. As to possible effects of demographic shifts, while final 2010 Census results aren’t out, it seems evident so far that Alabama didn’t experience the intensive growth in white suburban areas, and depopulation of black counties and neighborhoods, that it did in each of the preceding three decades. Total vote, in roughly equal-population districts, is a workable rough metric of turnout. A correlation this strong isn’t going to be significantly altered by accounting for these variables, and the operational consequences of the numbers reflected are still significant.

Clearly, we could have won several close House races by boosting turnout: identifying likely Democratic voters, and giving them whatever encouragement and assistance was necessary to get them to the polls. Focused turnout efforts work. Could we have retained control of the House (and presumably the Senate)? That would have been a tall order in 2010’s atmosphere, but we clearly could have held enough seats to deprive the Republicans of their filibuster-proof present majorities. This alone would have made an upgrade in the turnout game worthwhile.

More troubling is a set of numbers, represented on this chart by the vertical arrays of red and blue dots at the 100% and 0% GOP votes, respectively, on the X axis. These represent the 30 districts in which the Republican nominees were unopposed, and the 29 districts in which Democratic nominees were unopposed. The quickest use of the Mark I Eyeball statistical analyzer will show that there were more votes cast for unopposed Republicans than for unopposed Democrats. A lot more. Specifically, the 30 unopposed Republicans got a total of 389,012 votes, an average of 12,970; while the 29 unopposed Democrats trailed with 263,232, an average of 9,077.

Why should this trouble us? After all, we weren’t going to win many of those House seats anyway, right? The problem is, these numbers, both in the Democratic and Republican districts, probably almost entirely reflect straight party voting. While this would require detailed analysis of precinct-level results in those limited counties whose machines separately report straight ticket votes for verification, common sense tells us this is so. It’s a little difficult (though well worth the trouble) to vote. Almost no one is going to go to that trouble just to vote for their cousin/neighbor/deacon, the Representative, and not bother with the rest of the ballot. This is particularly true in the case where that Representative is unopposed - why bother? For decades, knowledgeable political observers have zeroed in on uncontested races as a rough measure of straight-ticket voting.

Given this, these numbers have significance both above and below the Legislature on the ballot. They reflect a serious shortcoming on the part of the Party in identifying and turning out Democratic voters. How serious? If each of the unopposed Democratic House members had averaged the same 12,970 votes as the unopposed Republicans, unopposed Democrats would have received, in the aggregate, 112,987 more votes, the vast majority of whom would have been straight ticket Democratic votes. For those with short memories, Jim Folsom, Jr., only lost his re-election bid for Lt. Governor by 46,009 votes. I am willing to wager that at least some local races were lost in these underperforming districts.

I also want to make one thing clear: I am not pointing out the Democratic Representatives in whose districts these shortcomings happened. While I do know one or two of them whose contribution to the Party effort leaves something to be desired, by and large voter identification and GOTV is a Party function, not that of an individual candidate. I am merely using House districts as a convenient and useful metric. The shortfalls were also noticeable in those districts with contested races. On a related note, I am not one of those Democrats who try to complain that the reason for our defeat was that “the blacks didn’t get their vote out.” In fact, of the 29 unopposed Democrats, six were white candidates in white-majority districts, and five of those six were in the lower half of the unopposed Democrats, in total votes received.

Fortunately, this is one area where the Alabama Democratic Party is on the ball. Under the leadership of Judge Kennedy, and Executive Director Bradley Davidson, the Party has undertaken a major voter identification project. This effort seeks to reach most voters before the 2012 election, and virtually all voters before 2014, to identify the partisan leanings (or independence) of each voter. The Party will then be in a position to target GOTV efforts on Democratic voters, and improve the dismal turnout statistics reflected in the above table. (We will also be able to target undecided voters with persuasive messaging!) This is something the Alabama Republican Party has been doing for nearly a decade now, in a very intense, well-funded and organized effort, and the past disparity in these efforts goes a long way toward explaining the results in 2012. For those who want to get involved, the Party website has a page devoted to the training sessions being offered. If you never get involved in another Democratic campaign effort, this is the one to join. It is going to change the face of Alabama politics, and for the better.

As long ago as the proto-democratic Athenian constitution of Draco (c. 650 B.C.E.), citizens were fined for failing to appear at the sessions of the Assembly to vote. A number of modern democracies follow the same practice. The United States does not, and should not, follow this practice. But voter apathy is a problem, and it’s particularly a problem when the Republicans are doing more about it than Democrats.

Reports of the Alabama Democratic Party’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

After a few weeks off to catch my breath, and to deal with everything from the real world that could be put off until after the election (including an unforeseen family health problem; thanks again, all, for the calls and emails), it’s time to take a look at what happened, and why, in last November’s elections.

What, we know. For the first time since the votes were counted by funny-talking guys in blue uniforms, Alabama will have a Republican legislature, and the Tennessee Valley will be represented by an elected Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives. Democrats suffered our first shutout ever in statewide offices. A number of elected local Democrats went down, but the casualty count there wasn’t as bad as it was upballot. Just to pull out some examples, Democratic Sheriffs Jerry Studdard in Talladega County and Jimmy Harris in DeKalb County, as well as Democratic Sheriff nominee Chuck Phillips in Jackson County, handily beat their GOP opponents, even while the statewide ticket was taking a thumping in their counties. So let’s start our analysis with the fact that, despite what you heard a “political scientist” proclaiming on television on election night, Alabamians, even white Alabamians, will vote for at least some Democrats.

Many pundits took the opportunity of this election to call it an ideological refudiation (to borrow a word from an execrable source) of progressive, Democratic ideology. Under this paradigm, moderate and independent voters were reacting to the “liberal” or “leftist” tilt of the Democratic Party. While the message mismanagement (and in some cases, nonmanagement) of the Obama Administration made this a plausible hypothesis, a closer look at the numbers doesn’t bear it out.

The biggest problem suffered by Alabama Democrats in 2010 was nothing less - or more - than a significant upsurge in the white voter turnout. To see clearly how much the white vote increased this year, compare the Democratic and Republican vote totals in two overwhelmingly white counties, and three black-majority Democratic strongholds, in the 2010 and 2006 gubernatorial races:

	Democratic 2006	Democratic 2010	Republican 2006	Republican 2010
Shelby	10,696	13,577	37,161	49,118
Cullman	9,537	8,801	15,081	21,083
Macon	4,541	6,632	1,274	919
Green	3,260	3,666	973	665
Perry	3,025	3,277	1,237	1,138

Note that the Democratic vote in Cullman did not drop off that much, and the Democratic vote in Shelby actually made a small uptick. This was not a matter of traditional white Democratic voters switching parties in significant numbers. This was, purely and simply, a case of a lot of white folks, who had not been voting in recent cycles, coming out of the woodwork last November. (Don’t let anyone tell you that the significant increase in Shelby County is attributable to population growth in the last quadrennium. In the wake of the Bush Recession, housing starts there shrank to a trickle in the runup to the 2010 election.) Neither were the increases in Macon and Greene Counties indicative of a statewide (and offsetting) increase in black turnout; local bingo shutdowns by Bob Riley were almost certainly responsible for those numbers.

Of course, the increased white vote was seriously polarized. Heavily white, but historically Democratic strongholds like Cherokee, Franklin, Marion, and Jackson Counties, went for Bentley. The correlation between race and party choice in this election is obvious:

You may have noticed that the correlation is not so strong in those counties where the black population is under 10%. This is a long-standing historical phenomenon, and many of those counties have been part of the Democratic base. The correlation strengthens significantly as the black population approaches and passes 30%. While this is in part the mathematical result of an overwhelmingly Democratic black vote becoming a larger portion of the electorate, historical precinct-level studies have confirmed that the phenomenon has been manifest within those counties, at the precinct level. This failure of these Democratic base counties to polarize as extremely as other counties provides significant statistical support for a conclusion that it was “new” voters, not switching voters (as in the media narrative), that caused the Republican surge.

What is harder to say is, what caused this increase in white turnout, and its polarization. In part, this is because there is not the depth of exit polling data available that typically follows a presidential election. But it doesn’t take a very seasoned political hand to guess what it was. In 2006, only a handful of political junkies in Alabama knew who Barack Obama was. In 2010, he was President, and the constant focus of the Republican campaign at every level. His what-me-worry messaging style only allowed the GOP to paint him as a scarier, more liberal, and less American figure. Yes, Alabama once again ran the race flag up the pole, and saluted it.

I can see one objection to this analysis, and it bears answering. If race was the determining factor in this year’s white turnout, why did the same thing not happen in 2008, when Obama was actually on the ballot? Why were Lucy Baxley, Bobby Bright, and then-Democrat Parker Griffith (does anyone still remember him??) not swamped in the same racist riptide that caught Jim Folsom, Jr., Susan Parker, and a raft of veteran legislators? It is my rejoinder to this objection that gives me hope for the Democratic Party’s future in Alabama.

To understand what made 2006 and 2008 different from 2010, we have to reset our mental worldviews to the earlier years. We have to avoid the historical amnesia that is more characteristic of Republican voters. In each of the earlier election years, potential voters were treated to a steady diet of Republican incompetence. Katrina, an un-caught bin Laden, two wars dragging on without results, and a growing stream of Bush scandals were part of the national zeitgeist in both election years. By the time of the 2008 election, Lehman Brothers (which was founded in Montgomery) had failed, and the economy had gone into free-fall, on Bush’s watch. Even Bubba, watching Fox News, couldn’t avoid his daily dose of this bad news. Anyone who doubts that this sort of steady diet of bad news can overcome the deepest prejudices or sympathies, needs only look around to see how many Auburn or Alabama sweatshirts (as the case may be) vanish from public view when one of those football teams is going 5-7. In that respect, racists (to their horror) are just like everyone else. Fair weather fans. They simply were de-energized by a tidal wave (no continuation of the football pun intended) of bad news, and stayed home in the 2006 and 2008 cycles.

Since the day of Hippocrates, diagnosis has been the better part of prescription. We cannot replicate the national disasters of the Bush years. (Neither, like the GOP House, should we seek to for political gain.) We cannot, apparently, tutor the President on effective progressive advocacy. But we, as Alabama Democrats, can do a more effective job of sharpening the differences between us and the Alabama Republican Party. We can do a much better job of bringing to voters’ attention the sordid figure of the Wall Street Wizard behind the “Christian” curtain. We can, with skill, create a large measure of both paid and earned media to trim the edges of racist enthusiasm (and, thus, turnout). We can, at long last, and despite sputtering efforts to claim we were doing so, finally have a cycle where the Democratic Party rings the doorbell of every regular Alabama voter, greets him or her by name, and asks for his or her support. I am optimistic about the prospects of this from the comments of newly-elected SDEC Chairman, Judge Mark Kennedy. In his acceptance speech, he promised that “We are going to eat their elephant one sound bite at a time.” This (along with my years of knowing Judge Kennedy, and having helped in his judicial campaigns) tells me that he at least sees where the problem is. I suggest we all do what we can to help Judge Kennedy keep this focus, and resist the “wisdom” of the cliques who would tell him to keep doing things the old way.

Take heart in this. Whatever you read in the pro-Republican “media” in many parts of Alabama, do not become too discouraged. It may well be that the reports of the Alabama Democratic Party’s demise have been, like those of the Sage of Hannibal, greatly exaggerated.