{"id":6427,"date":"2016-03-03T07:00:34","date_gmt":"2016-03-03T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=6427"},"modified":"2016-03-02T23:55:01","modified_gmt":"2016-03-03T04:55:01","slug":"moco-dems-who-dont-vote-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=6427","title":{"rendered":"MoCo Dems Who Don\u2019t Vote, Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m following the lead of my students and heading out of town on Spring Break. Fortunately, Adam Pagnucco has written a series on Montgomery Democrats who don’t vote. Today, I am pleased to present the first part:<\/em><\/p>\n

General Assembly Democrats have decided to pursue automatic voter registration in this year\u2019s session.\u00a0 There\u2019s a good policy rationale for it<\/a> and efforts to increase resident access to voting are generally commendable.\u00a0 There is also a fair dose of politics here. Democrats are pursuing this because they think it will net them more votes, and Republicans are opposing it for the same reason.\u00a0 Yet, there\u2019s little evidence<\/a> in our state that increasing registration will automatically increase votes for Democrats in gubernatorial elections.<\/p>\n

Instead of concentrating on people who don\u2019t register, Democrats should look at a different group for the purpose of expanding their turnout: people who register as Democrats but don\u2019t vote.<\/p>\n

Why do people register but don\u2019t vote?\u00a0 Part of the explanation lies in how relentlessly targeted modern political campaigns are.\u00a0 In a context of scarce resources, campaigns strive to touch voters who a) are likely to actually vote and b) are potentially receptive to the candidate\u2019s message.\u00a0 That means orienting mail, email, field operations and even social media<\/a> towards voters with regular histories of voting.\u00a0 Those voters who vote regularly get inundated with candidate communications.\u00a0 Those who don\u2019t get much less of it.<\/p>\n

Consider me.\u00a0 I moved to the county in 2003.\u00a0 I had a long history of voting in D.C. and New York but that didn\u2019t show up in my Maryland voter registration record.\u00a0 I voted in the 2004 primary and general elections.\u00a0 In my first state-level election of 2006, only two candidates sent me mail: Hans Riemer and Duchy Trachtenberg, both non-incumbents running for the County Council.\u00a0 Both had well-financed operations and perhaps they felt they could take a chance on appealing to a wider field of voters than just those who had voted in 1998 and 2002.\u00a0 County Executive candidates Ike Leggett and Steve Silverman, who raised over $3 million between them, didn\u2019t contact me.<\/p>\n

Now, if I was feeling ignored, that didn\u2019t last!\u00a0 I continued to vote regularly and by 2010, I got lots of mail.\u00a0 Don\u2019t ask me about 2014.\u00a0 My recycling can is still recovering.<\/p>\n

So what is likely to happen to all the new voters who are automatically registered under the state Democrats\u2019 proposal?\u00a0 They will probably be ignored by Democratic candidates for state and local office because they don\u2019t have voting histories.\u00a0 Some of them might vote in presidential elections because information on those candidates is easy to come by.\u00a0 (Who on Planet Earth has not heard of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?)\u00a0 But a combination of declining local media coverage and micro-targeted local campaigns will give them no information on local races and lots of them will sit out.<\/p>\n

That is exactly what is happening in Montgomery County.\u00a0 From the 1990 general election through the 2006 general election, voter registration rose from 365,960 to 507,924 \u2013 an increase of 39%.\u00a0 At the same time, the actual number of general election voters rose from 211,199 to 308,429 \u2013 an increase of 46%.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s remember what happened around the end of that time period.\u00a0 The presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and Barack Obama took voter targeting to a new level with email, data-mining and (later) social media.\u00a0 Campaigns became much more efficient at reaching small groups of likely voters.\u00a0 And all of this filtered down into state and local races, especially in MoCo, where so many candidates and campaign staffers have ties to the national level.<\/p>\n

This had an impact in Montgomery County.\u00a0 From the 2006 general election through the 2014 general election, voter registration rose from 507,924 to 634,663 \u2013 an increase of 25%.\u00a0 But the actual number of voters dropped in 2010 and again in 2014.\u00a0 The 2006 general saw 308,429 voters while the 2014 general saw 267,456 voters \u2013 a decline of 13%.\u00a0 At the same time, the number of MoCo voters in presidential general elections has been rising steadily in every cycle since at least 1990.<\/p>\n

What we are witnessing now is a shrinking snowball effect.\u00a0 As each gubernatorial cycle passes, the pool of targeted voters shrinks as people who vote regularly pass away or move out.\u00a0 And those without voting histories are ignored by candidates, and don\u2019t vote, and so their numbers grow.<\/p>\n

This should be a major concern for both Maryland and MoCo Democrats, because low turnout in MoCo (as well as Baltimore City and Prince George\u2019s) significantly contributed to Larry Hogan\u2019s winning the Governor seat.\u00a0 More registration won\u2019t fix it.\u00a0 More efforts to turn out an ever-smaller group of regular Democratic voters won\u2019t fix it.\u00a0 But communicating with people who are already registered Democrats and who, for whatever reason, aren\u2019t voting just might fix it.<\/p>\n

So who are these Democrats who don\u2019t vote?\u00a0 We\u2019ll find out in Part Two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m following the lead of my students and heading out of town on Spring Break. Fortunately, Adam Pagnucco has written a series on Montgomery Democrats who don’t vote. Today, I am pleased to present the first part: General Assembly Democrats have decided to pursue automatic voter registration in this year\u2019s session.\u00a0 There\u2019s a good policy … Continue reading MoCo Dems Who Don\u2019t Vote, Part One<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,217],"tags":[1545],"class_list":["post-6427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-montgomery-county","category-turnout","tag-adam-pagnucco"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-1FF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6428,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6427\/revisions\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}