Democrats benefit from low turnout now

Don't rock the vote.

"TRUMP barn" by dankeck, CC0 1.0

For many years, I’ve heard Democrats fret that Republicans were trying to reduce voter turnout in order to win elections. This rhetoric kicked into high gear after 2020, with some Dems even framing measures like voter ID laws as assaults on democracy itself. I was always a bit suspicious of this line. Of course I want to make it as easy as possible for qualified people to vote, but lots of countries have voter ID laws, and states that have implemented voter ID laws haven’t seen much change. But more fundamentally, data I was seeing, and analyses I was reading, suggested that suppressing voter turnout now generally hurts Republicans instead of hurting Democrats. So GOP vote suppression measures seemed likely to backfire.

But I am not a political analyst, and so I hesitated to write about this. Instead I asked my friend Wally Nowinski, who wrote an excellent guest post for Noahpinion about NIMBY environmental groups back in 2022, to do a deep dive on the voter turnout issue. He did not disappoint.

Wally is the former CMO of Collage.com (sold in 2021), and former democratic ads director for House and Senate Dem candidates. He tweets at @nowooski.

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For decades, Democrats have fought to increase voter turnout – believing that their candidates and issues would prevail if more people would get out to the polls. That math no longer pencils out. Republicans have become the party that benefits from high voter turnout, and Democrats the party that benefits if marginal voters stay home. 

This shifting landscape is difficult for many on the left to stomach. Activists and influencers spent the Trump era convincing Democrats that the GOP is going to voter-suppression America into fascism. That the best way to beat Trump is to maximize turnout. And that it’s critical to fight voter ID laws tooth and nail. 

But there is mounting evidence from polling and surveys, demographic trends, and election results that show that high turnout is a gift to Republicans. The rise of Donald Trump has realigned voting blocks – sending college-educated voters who consistently vote into the arms of Democrats while attracting irregular voters to the GOP. For the first time in 2024, polls are showing that the likeliest voters are Democrats, while the ones who are less likely to vote are Republicans. And Democrats have been consistently outperforming in low-turnout special elections – providing dozens of examples of Democrats benefiting when people stay home. 

The information all points to a new reality: The fewer people vote, the more likely Democrats are to win. And downstream of that, many long-held assumptions about the impact of things like voter ID laws and get-out-the-vote campaigns may no longer have the electoral effect they used to. This is true even though activists across the political spectrum haven’t internalized it yet. 

America’s least-likely voters prefer Trump

Let’s start with the polling. Pollsters will sometimes release two sets of numbers, one showing how the race stands with all registered voters and another with likely voters. Traditionally, Democrats have done better in the registered voter sample than in the likely voter sample. 

But in 2024, that flipped. Poll after poll this year has found that Joe Biden performs better with likely voters than with registered voters, a fact Biden himself noted in his July 11 press conference. “I can give you a series of polls where you have likely voters, me versus Trump, where I win all the time,” Biden said.  “When the unlikely voters vote, he wins sometimes.” 

Below, see six months of New York Times/Siena College polls that include both likely voter and registered voter samples. While Biden is not winning in these match-ups, he has consistently performed about 2 percentage points better with the smaller “likely voter” electorate than with the broader universe of registered voters. 

Source: NYT

One way to test this trend is by going through past polling data and sorting it by propensity to vote – an effort multiple groups have undertaken. 

In an article in May, David Wasserman at the Cook Political Report and a team of other researchers looked at swing-state polling and combined it with voter history. They divided their 4,000-respondent swing state poll into three buckets: high-engagement voters, who voted in all four of the past four federal elections. Low/mid-engagement voters, who skipped at least one of the past four elections; and newly registered voters. 

They found that Trump had a commanding lead among low/mid-engagement voters and new registrants, while Biden was on top among the people who vote in every election. Wasserman dubbed the partisan differences the “participation gap.”

The New York Times published a study where they looked back at the voting history of respondents to their regular polls and found Biden performed the best among the dedicated voters who turned out for a 2022 primary election, while Trump had a massive 14-point lead among registered voters who have never cast a ballot.  

“If everyone voted, it is Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, who would benefit,” the Times wrote. The article has a nice visualization that is worth checking out. 

Source: NYT

It’s not just lower propensity voters skew Republican, there’s also more self identified Republicans than Democrats now according to Gallup. For decades, that fact self-identified Democrats outnumbered Republicans was one of the reasons people believed increased turnout would benefit Dems. That’s no longer the case. 

Source: Gallup

High turnout is already hurting Democrats

This phenomenon isn’t just showing up in the polling. The first real-world evidence we saw of Democrats benefiting from lower turnout was the 2020 Georgia runoff for the U.S. Senate, featuring Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican David Perdue, which presented a quasi-natural experiment of who benefits from high voter turnout. 

In Georgia, there is a runoff election if no Senate candidate receives more than 50% of the vote on Election Day. This runoff is held several weeks later and attracts fewer voters. 

In the 2020 November general election, which saw a record turnout of 67%, Joe Biden won by a mere 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million cast in Georgia. In the Senate election held at the same time, Democrat Jon Ossof came in second to Republican David Perdue, trailing him by 88,098 votes. But Ossof managed to keep Perdue under 50% and forced a runoff. 

The runoff was held nine weeks later. Turnout fell by 9 percentage points as half a million Georgians who voted in round one decided to stay home. In the lower turnout environment, Jon Ossof saw his 88,000-vote deficit turn into a 55,000-vote victory. Even though 100,000 fewer people voted for Ossoff than did in the first round, 250,000 fewer voted for Perdue. 

The 500,000 marginal voters who voted in the high-turnout Presidential Election but skipped the runoff were overwhelmingly Republicans. 

The Georgia vote isn’t the only time down-ballot Democrats have performed better in low-turnout environments in recent years. The DailyKos special election tracker shows that for the 58 special elections for state legislature and US Congress so far in 2023-2024, Democratic candidates have outperformed Biden’s 2020 results by 3.8% on average. 

This is significant because turnout in special elections is much, much lower than it is in a Presidential Election. In elections where only the most dedicated voters cast ballots, Democrats do better. 

How did we get here? 

The conventional wisdom that Democrats needed to drive up turnout and do things like mobilize young voters crystallized during the 90s. This was a time when turnout in presidential elections was quite low by global and historical standards and Gen X was seen as particularly disengaged (at least relative to the romanticized notions that Boomers had of their own youth). 

But it’s no longer true that voter turnout in America is low. Turnout in the 2020 Presidential Election was 66% — higher than this month’s elections in the UK (60%) or France (64%).  Americans are engaged and voting at higher numbers now than at any point in the last 50 years. 

The increase in voter turnout we’ve seen over the last two decades means that the profile of the marginal voter has also changed. When 50% of voters didn’t bother to cast a ballot, as was the case in 1988, you might reasonably assume that the marginal non-voter is something of an average Joe and that there are structural issues at play. Maybe voting was too hard? Maybe people weren’t aware of the issues and candidates? Maybe the political parties were doing a bad job turning their voters out?

But as turnout increases, and spending on elections increases, the profile of the marginal non-voter is also changing. When social pressure to vote is high; when campaign ads are ubiquitous; when campaigns are spending tens of millions of dollars texting, mailing and calling non-voters, the decision to not cast a ballot starts to become more of an active choice. 

Of course some people who want to vote encounter obstacles that prevent them from doing so. Life, or election rules get in the way. But this isn’t 30-40% of registered voters. The non-voters aren’t staying home because they somehow missed the $3.5 billion of political messaging letting them know about the issues. And they aren’t staying home because they only got 30 GOTV text messages instead of 31. They are staying home because they are not interested in participating in the system. They have low social trust, don’t like politicians, and aren’t members of community groups like churches or PTAs where they might feel social pressure to vote. 

Trump appealed to some of these people in a way that no Democrat or Republican candidate has. He activated millions of low-trust white voters, and also did surprisingly well with some African American and Hispanic men, particularly in 2020.* 

But the aspects of Trump’s personality and politics that brought disaffected non-voters into his coalition repelled college educated suburbanites, some of the most reliable voters in America, and drove them to the Democratic Party. You can see the Trump effect on the partisan leanings of college grads in this Pew poll. Obama had made some inroads with college grads, but it was dislike of Trump that turned them from 50/50 block to a strongly Democratic one. 

Source: Pew

I’d note that these polls are from 2019, and it is very likely this trend has continued since then. 

"But what about young voters?”

One of the most common questions I hear from Democratic friends when I tell them Dems benefit from low turnout is, “What about young voters, or non-white voters, or [other groups thought of as Democratic]? Surely we want to increase turnout among them, right?”

The answer is maybe not. 

The fact that America is increasingly polarized by social trust and civic engagement means that within any group or cross section of society – including age and race –  the more likely someone is to vote, the more likely they are to support Democrats. 

To help illustrate this point, I made charts looking at a hypothetical group where 60% of members support Democrats. Each chart is divided into five columns. On the left are the most likely voters and on the right are the least likely. In a world where there is no correlation between likelihood to vote and partisanship, increasing turnout in this group is always good for Democrats. But in a world where likelihood to vote is correlated with partisanship, increasing turnout beyond a certain level starts to help Republicans. This is true even in a group that is 60/40 Democratic. 

I’d note this works the other way as well. In a world polarized by likelihood to vote, any effort to drive down turnout is likely to disproportionately hurt Republicans. That is true because no group is monolithically Democratic and it's reasonably likely the marginal voter, the one most likely to not vote in the face of obstacles, is a Trump supporter. 

So why do Republicans and Elon Musk want to make it harder to vote? 

Earlier this month, House Republicans made a big PR push around an election reform act called American Confidence in Elections (ACE). The key messaging point was prohibiting non-citizens from voting in U.S. elections (already illegal), but also included a grab bag of other measures that Democratic activists denounced as voter suppression. Elon Musk sent out many tweets championing this bill and accused anyone who opposes it of treason. 

But why, if Democrats benefit from low voter turnout now, are Republicans trying to make it harder to vote and Democrats trying to make it easier? 

I think this basically boils down to the fact that people get very attached to their narratives about how the world works and are very slow to update their beliefs and actions when the fundamentals change.

Part of it is probably inertia. In the Trump era, Republicans repackaged their long standing agenda of voter ID laws and other voting restrictions in the language of immigration. It wasn’t just that voter ID rules were “common sense,” it was that Democrats were trying to import illegal voters to “steal elections.” Following Trump’s failed autogolpe in 2020, limits on early voting and voter ID rules became a core piece of Trumpism under the somewhat ominous language of “election integrity.” It’s very hard to do a quick 180 on an issue like that, though there are signs Republicans are starting to understand the new reality and are trying to pivot. In a reversal from 2020, Trump and the GOP are urging supporters to vote early this year.

What should Democrats do? 

If your goal is to increase voter turnout for small-d democratic reasons, that is great. The point of politics is to advance causes you believe are important, and Democrats advance lots of issues that are politically costly because they believe it is the morally right thing to do. But it’s important to be clear-eyed about that trade. 

If you’re a Democrat who is worked up about voter turnout and voter ID rules because you think it’s critical to stopping Trump, you should find the new reality comforting. The GOP is not going to use voter ID laws and other ballot restrictions to entrench permanent power. These policies reduce turnout at the margin, and the marginal voter is more likely than ever to be a Republican. Democrats should accept that American politics has realigned and update their strategy to reflect that. This is true for everyone from armchair activists to Democratic officials. 

Democratic office holders: Remember that it is Donald Trump and the Republicans who have the strongest support among irregular and newly registered voters. You don’t need to keep fighting tooth and nail against things like voter ID requirements that are overwhelmingly popular, particularly when the latest studies show they have a negligible impact. 

Democratic tech workers: Lots of social networks and tech platforms are full of get-out-the-vote (GOTV) nudges now. Many of these, like Facebook’s voter registration reminders, were first implemented in the Obama era. I can’t say for certain the goal was to help Democrats, but given the political leanings of tech workers, I’m guessing at least some had that objective in mind. But the world has changed. So unless you’re Elon Musk and actively trying to get Trump elected, maybe reconsider that new GOTV feature you’ve been thinking about. 

All Democrats: Calm down. If you’re worried Republicans are trying to suppress the vote, console yourself with the fact that it may well backfire. Think twice about imploring your disengaged social media friends to vote. The base of the Democratic Party is college grads and Black women, two of the most reliable voting blocks in America. Just like you, they are going to make it to the polls.

If everyone in the country voted, Donald Trump would probably win. 

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