This is a golden age of high voter turnout
Voters cast their ballots for the California gubernatorial recall election at a vote center set up in Los Angeles Union Station on Sept. 14. (Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP)
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There are many reasons that the attempted recall of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) failed so miserably. Newsom successfully used the stark party divide on the covid pandemic to his advantage, and more fundamentally, the idea that a reasonably popular (if hardly beloved) Democratic governor would lose this election in California when the leading Republican candidate to replace him was a far-right radio host was absurd from the start.
But there’s another story, one that shows the California recall to be the latest example of a broader trend defining American elections. We are now in a period of unusually high turnout, one that looks like it will continue for the foreseeable future.
They’re still counting votes in California, but a prime reason Newsom’s win was so emphatic — voters rejected the recall by a nearly 2-to-1 margin — was high turnout in the overwhelmingly blue state. An election that could have been determined by an angry minority saw millions of Democrats cast ballots, not because they thought so highly of Newsom but because they were so determined to avoid the alternative.
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Now consider some other recent elections:
In 2020, 66 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the presidential race, an increase of 6 percentage points over the 2016 election. Over 21 million more people voted in 2020 than in 2016.
In the twin Senate runoffs in Georgia this January, 4.4 million people voted, more than doubling the previous record for a runoff and exceeding even the 2016 presidential election turnout in the state.
In the 2018 midterm elections, turnout hit 50 percent — higher than any midterm election in over a century.
An important caveat is that by the standards of our peer countries, turnout in the United States remains rather low. Nevertheless, many more of us are going to the polls than did a few years ago.
And it’s an extraordinary change; it wasn’t that long ago that political analysts would write papers and hold conferences lamenting low turnout and participation, asking whether the United States could function as a democracy when so few Americans seemed to care about elections.
Not everyone was upset about it, though. Low voter turnout, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in 2008, was something to celebrate, a sign “that people feel secure enough about the health of the country and its leaders that people don’t have to obsess about politics all the time.”
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McConnell felt that way in no small part because low voter turnout generally benefited Republicans: Because their voters were more likely to be older, whiter, and wealthier, they would turn out in strong numbers almost no matter what. It was the Democrats’ voters who might not show up.
That’s part of the reason that voter suppression has long been such a key part of Republican electoral strategy: While some of their attempts to make voting more difficult are aimed squarely at Democratic-leaning constituencies, others (like ID requirements) make it a bit more difficult for everyone to vote, on the assumption that Republicans will have an easier time getting past the hurdles.
So what’s changed? It isn’t because a wave of public-spiritedness swept across the land.
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There are multiple reasons, but a key explanation lies in polarization and negative partisanship: Put simply, millions of people in both parties have come to believe that if the other side wins, everything they value and believe in could be destroyed.
Also, there’s Donald Trump.
He played a key role in all those elections — sometimes more directly and sometimes less, but he was there in every one. If he wasn’t on the ballot (as in 2020), Democrats used the specter of his influence to motivate turnout among their base (as in 2018).
That happened even in the California recall: Trump may now be spending his time beclowning himself as an amateur pay-per-view announcer, but the Newsom campaign linked its chief Republican rival to him, arguing that a loss for Newsom would be a triumph for Trumpism.
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As long as Trump remains the de facto leader of the GOP — and as long as the party continues to fashion itself in his image — Democrats will be able to make that argument. They’ll say that you have to vote because if you don’t, Trump and everything he represents will triumph. And as long as people on both sides are angry and afraid, they’ll keep turning out.
Now imagine what will happen if Trump runs again in 2024.
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