Turnout turnout turnout

Judge Moore heading into the sunset on a horse that clearly doesn't like him very much, via Deadspin.

My favorite statistic from yesterday's Alabama Senate election is this, as reported in the Washington Post:

 “These swings can be seen in counties majority white and black, Republican and Democrat. And that means it couldn’t have just been a surge in African American turnout, or just rural Trump voters staying home, or just Republicans crossing over to vote for Jones. Jones’ campaign was able to achieve a combination of the three that drove him to victory. Despite it being an off-year special election in December, Jones got 92 percent of Hillary Clinton’s vote total. Moore just got 49 percent of Trump’s.” 

The authorities were expecting a 25% turnout, meaning really big for an out-of-season race, and instead they got 40%, but that unexpected crowd was not symmetrical. Half of Trump's voters couldn't bring themselves to vote for Moore, but nearly all of Clinton's voters came out for Jones.

Turnout troofing

Yesterday the Times Upshot ran a piece by Nate Cohn analyzing the 2016 presidential election in terms of what looks to me like another take in the Legendary White Working Class family of takes, identifying the crucial factor in Trump's victory as that particular set of white-no-college voters who voted for Obama in 2008 and/or 2012 but for Trump in 2016, and who are said to have made this remarkable switch mostly out of racial resentment (I actually don't think that's as bizarre as it sounds, but the obvious question it raises, of why a white person who voted for Obama one year would turn around against Clinton out of racial resentment the next time, is one Cohn doesn't even discuss) and then out of disappointment with Obama and then lastly because they agree with Trump's policy prescriptions as they understand them.

Which Cohn does not take to mean that Democrats need to appeal more to racists, even though that's what his data makes it sound like, but that we should take positions more like those of imaginary Trump, in favor of lots of infrastructure spending, and trade protectionism, and relatively relaxed sexual views. The great Zandar of Kentucky, though, hears Cohn thinking it, and he doesn't like it:

What that means is that Cohn is strongly suggesting that in order to be competitive, Democrats have to make a sea change to attract voters that harbor no small amount of racial resentment. Trump was able to leverage that resentment into massive distrust of the Obama administration and Democrats in general.

The problem is that this will come at a cost, and the cost will be borne by black, Latinx, and Asian voters and candidates [and female candidates too, I'd add].  I've said before that this path is suicidal for the Dems and so far Trump is making it incredibly easy to make the Democrats be the party of inclusiveness in comparison by simple dint of Trump's overwhelmingly awful racism, if not open support of white supremacists.

Nor do I.

Those chads didn't hang themSELVES, you know!

Doctor Steins with Tardis. Via wibbilywobblytimeywimey.

Steve M is being a worrywort again, this time on the possibility that Dr. Stein, the Green candidate, could do to Secretary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic candidate, what Nader did to Gore 16 years ago, in the election that Changed Everything (including giving birth to the anguished political blog: Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo made its first appearance a week after the ballot, specifically to track developments in the elections theft, on November 12 2000, though the earliest post I can find is from November 13).

Because if the cool-kid Sanders supporters can't vote for Sanders in the general election they will be voting for Stein rather than voting for Clinton, judging from the popular press (BuzzFeed and The Atlantic), and this could take the election away from Clinton the way the Nader vote took the election away from Gore in 2000. Really?

Turnout tribulations

Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels in Young Mr. Jazz (1919), from Shari Lobdell.

"If the turnout is high, we win," quoth the Bern, and he keeps saying it, with the implication that all the nonvoters out there are just waiting for some explosion of progressiveness to stimulate them into showing up at the polling place, an attractive idea, certainly, to me; the indifference to politics of the many always seems to me like the main thing stopping this from being democracy, and the solution should be to offer them something worth voting for (which happened, clearly, in the relatively high turnout of November 2008).

Only by Super Tuesday you could see pretty clearly it was not true in the present case, and it began to really irritate me that Sanders kept on believing it, but I kind of stopped trying to prove he was wrong because he didn't seem to be wrong in a very interesting way—not so much a pattern he was missing as no pattern at all—and trying to get a properly numerical grip on it was really difficult, or boring, or both.

Then as the Indiana results started coming in I got interested again, with the exit polls suggesting there was some kind of surge among young voters, with an unusual 47% of the total younger than 45, Was the Sanders prediction starting to come true at last?

Michigan meshugas

Googling "turnout". Photo by dyingtobeadyingswan.

So, well. All the newspapers have been awfully coy about discussing the significance of the Democratic turnout in Michigan yesterday, which was apparently around 1.2 million voters (the Detroit News reports 1.3 million Republican votes out of 2.5 million total). Which is a subject I'm always particularly interested in, and especially now in the context of the Sanders campaign and the "people's revolution" (as he called it twice last night before correcting it to "political revolution"—he was clearly very tired): are the voters he calls to, the young and the ripped-off casualties of economic stagnation, unable to find decent jobs or pay off their school loans or in so many cases finish school at all—are they showing up for the revolution?

As you might think they are, from the hugely unexpected character of these results. As opposed to all the previous contests, where the Democratic turnout seems really weak while the Republican turnout is really scarily strong, this one seems like an enormous upset in Sanders's favor, and a fulfillment of his prophecy, that the normal nonvoters, people usually too cynical or alienated to do their citizen duty, are going to come out this time because the revolution is on offer.

What came around went back home

I need to partially withdraw what I said a month or so ago about negative political advertising and turnout: apparently it's not the case that negative campaign ads depress voter turnout. At least according to The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment by Richard R. Lau, Lee Sigelman, and Ivy Brown Rovner in The Journal of Politics, Vol. 69, No. 4, November 2007 (PDF at this address, via NPR).

The original Demon Sheep, Tony Blair, in a Tory ad from 1997. Guardian. He won his election.

What these authors did was to take the findings from 111 different studies completed between 1984 and 2006 and mash them up together into one big study (a "meta-analysis" because [jump]

What goes around comes home to roost, or something

Turnout in the Republican primaries is seriously low, Kos in person reports, and Dr. Newt Gingrich, million-dollar historian and famed verbal terrorist with the international Belgian colonialist conspiracy, thinks he knows why: it's that rotter Romney, or rather the SuperPac that isn't coordinated with him, I mean of course it isn't coordinated with any candidate—that would be against the law!—but it's more specially not coordinated with Romney than anybody else, Restore our Future (a terrific retroactionary name, by the way, with its evocation of a future that has become a little shabby and shopworn, so that we need to spiff it up somewhat before we carry it with us on our long march into the long ago).

Fire belly Newt. From IMproPRieTies.

Anyway, Gingrich says it is all the negative advertising that is driving the voters into staying home, and he may well be right (even a stopped clock etc.).  According to Wikipedia [jump]