Not only does CNN analyst Harry Enten think that President Joe Biden is polling better among likely voters than registered voters, but he also says Biden might benefit from low turnout in November.
“It turns out that this potentially lower turnout, who does it benefit more? It actually benefits Biden more than it benefits Donald Trump at this particular moment,” Enten said.
Enten’s supposition was that the “likely voters” who appear to be the foundation of Biden’s coalition are higher propensity voters who will show up in every election, whileTrump is generally polling better among a wider swath of lower propensity voters. So a low turnout electorate would include most of Biden’s voters while leaving behind some of Trump’s coalition.
If that holds true in November, it would be a sea change regarding which party benefits from low turnout and high turnout elections. Typically, big electorates have benefited Democrats while a more narrow electorate has benefited Republicans.
Democrats’ unprecedented string of wins in special elections, which are typically low turnout affairs, also backs up the notion that Democrats are indeed excelling with higher propensity voters who previously voted Republican.
But what happens when the electorate expands, as it inevitably does in a general election?
“In the typical special election, half of voters are 65 and over. Nearly every special election voter has participated in a recent primary election. Almost everyone is a registered Democrat or Republican. Young voters, irregular voters, and independent voters are much scarcer. The nonwhite share of voters is typically smaller,” New York Times data analyst Nate Cohn writes. “As a result, special elections behave very differently from higher-turnout elections. They’re mostly decided by turnout, as the electorate consists almost entirely of the most partisan and least persuadable voters.”
Democrats, who are over-performing in special elections, are likely to suffer when the electorate reverts to general election form in November, many pundits argue.
But Democratic success in special elections doesn’t necessarily mean the inverse is true—that Democrats can’t also hold their own in high turnout elections.
“If you tend to think about which is the party that’s most associated with Get Out The Vote drives, it’s normally Democrats,” Enten noted on CNN.
So what happens if that Democratic GOTV infrastructure not only continues but gets more sophisticated, targeted, and efficient at turning out pro-Biden, pro-Democratic voters?
That’s exactly what veteran Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg said is poised to happen this election cycle given Democrats’ continued hard-dollar financial advantage.
Rosenberg told The Bulwark Podcast host Tim Miller that he thinks what’s “missing” from the conversation is “the impact of all this money we’re raising from this higher educated, hyper-engaged set of voters that are building the biggest campaigns that we’ve ever had, which are allowing us to control the information environment and also reach lower propensity voters in our coalition that we could never reach before because we just didn’t have the resources.”
He also said that one of the reasons Democrats have been crushing it in these special elections is that their campaigns are bigger, more flush, and better equipped to reach Democratic voters than ever before. So the campaigns combined with the grassroots are “pushing our performance to the upper end of what’s possible” in these special elections.
Similarly, the Biden campaign’s Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty told Crooked Media’s Jon Favreau how an early Biden campaign investment last year is helping to optimize its field operation now.
“If you look at last year, we had this $30 million ad buy we started in August, and these organizing pilots that were sitting under them at the same time in Arizona and Wisconsin, and the goal of that was to [find], what tactics are going to work, what messages are going to work and all that stuff,” he said.
Among their takeaways: Trust is at a premium, making messengers, validators, and testimonials matter more than ever. And ultimately, the Biden campaign was able to develop a system to find organizers from the communities they need to turn out, recruit them at scale, and then have them recruit more volunteers to do the same thing.
“What we were able to develop through those pilots was a really good system of getting hard to reach volunteers to reach hard to reach people through conversations and through content,” Flaherty said.
That type of tactic testing and refining is partly fueled by the advantage of incumbency and a notable cash advantage, but it’s also part and parcel of what the Democratic Party is known for and has excelled at for decades.
It’s impossible to predict turnout in any election, but Democrats could conceivably benefit from a twofer in November: The most robust and targeted GOTV operation they’ve ever assembled along with the turnout of high-propensity voters that have routinely propelled Democratic overperformance in the Trump era.