Over at “The Hill”:http://thehill.com/, Markos Moulitsas of “The Daily Kos”:www.dailykos.com writes of a “Brutal Poll for Dems”:http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/markos-moulitas/70053-brutal-poll-for-dems. He reports on a Research 2000 poll suggesting that Republican are much more likely to vote in the 2010 congressional elections. He notes that:
bq. Among Republican respondents, 81 percent said they were definitely or probably going to vote, versus only 14 percent who were definitely or not likely to do so. Among independent voters, it was 65-23. Among Democrats? A woeful 56-40: Two out of every five Democrats are currently unlikely to vote.
bq. A look at key Democratic constituencies shows how demoralized the party’s base currently is. Among African-Americans, just 34 percent are likely to vote, versus 54 percent unlikely to do so. Republican-leaning white voters clocked in at 66-29. Only 41 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds, a key constituency for Democrats in both 2006 and 2008, are likely to vote, compared to 49 percent likely to sit things out.
The result of these trends?
bq. Democrats will suffer at the ballot box.
It is all well and good to report these numbers, but without a reference point to compare them to, I don’t think it can really tell us anything about what is likely to happen in 2010. To put this another way, if you had asked me off the top of my head whether 18-29 year olds were more likely to vote in any off-year congressional election than “Republican leaning white voters”, I’d have picked the Republican leaning white voters.
Or another way of thinking about this: according to the “United States Election Project”:http://elections.gmu.edu/Turnout_2006G.html, turnout in the 2006 off-year congressional elections for the country as a whole was 40.3%. If the Democrats, who still “outnumber Republicans in terms of party-identifiers”:http://www.gallup.com/poll/122693/Democratic-Advantage-Party-Affiliation-Shrinks.aspx, can actually get close to 60% of their supporters to turn out in a mid-term election, mightn’t that be a particularly good outcome? Again, I’m not sure, but that’s because I don’t know what kind of turnout we need to see among Democrats in order for Democrats to perform well in a mid-term election.
I don’t doubt the central premise of the article – that there is an enthusiasm gap between supporters of the Republicans and Democrats at this point in time – but we need some reference points to get a sense of how these likelihood to vote numbers are likely to translate into actual election results. Perhaps the most useful would be participation rates in 2006 – can any readers of The Monkey Cage help out by providing commensurate numbers from that race to the ones Moulitsas has cited in the article? If so, please add them in the comments section, and I’d be happy to update this post later.