By Chris Satullo
GOTV. That acronym is mysterious to the general public, but vital to any political pro.
GOTV = Get. Out. The. Vote.
This election year, millions have already been spent – and hundreds of millions are yet to be spent – on tactics, some as old as the Republic, some as new as Tik Tok, meant to persuade Americans to do their civic duty and vote.
Well, to be clear, the candidates and parties who fling money at GOTV are not out to persuade all Americans. Only those inclined to vote the way the person spending the money wants them to vote.
All this money gets spent as if the people spending it actually knew a) why people don’t vote and b) what will induce them to get off their duffs and go to the polls.
A new study by the Knight Foundation suggests that a lot of that money – not all, but a lot – will be spent on tactics that misconstrue the reasons why adult Americans so often sit an election out.
The study is called “The 100 Million Project.” Why that round number? Rounding up slightly, it’s how many eligible voters didn’t vote in the 2016 election.
Combined with a slightly older but complementary study by More in Common Inc. called “The Hidden Tribes of America,” this research gives a clearer picture than before of where Donald Trump found those hundred thousand swing-state votes in 2016 that won him the Electoral College. The study also undermines some assumptions that nervous progressives (me included) have been chanting to curb their anxiety about this November.
In short, the pool of voters who could by any practical means be induced to vote in November is way smaller than 100 million. What’s more, the study indicates, that smaller universe of possible voters is pretty evenly split among likely Republican votes, likely Democratic votes and anybody’s guess votes. (The latter swing group is driven not by a coherent ideology, but by a general sense of being mighty pissed off).
None of this should be comforting to the progressives who dismiss any plan to convert moderate or independent voters back to the D column as a waste of time. These activists believe fervently the focus should be solely on mobilizing a putative horde of quietly woke voters who, they believe, will respond to a well-placed nudge by swarming to the polls and pushing Bernie into the Oval Office.
The Knight study doesn’t explode that hope, but it isn’t kind to it, either. Researchers surveyed 12,000 chronic non-voters. Here’s how the report sums up the key findings:
“Many non-voters suffer from a lack of faith in the election system and have serious doubts about the impact of their own votes.“
They are way more likely to say the system is rigged, less likely to see the impact that government decisions have on their lives. You can see how the messages of both Trump and Sanders could at least catch some of these folks’ attention.
“Non-voters engage less with news and are left feeling underinformed.“
This group has always encountered news passively – in snatches heard while moving through life. But in the current digital media environment – full of silos and overrun with entertainment options – they don’t even bump into news by accident that much anymore.
“Non-voters are less partisan and more evenly divided on key issues and on President Trump than active voters.“
If they all voted in 2020, non-voters nationally would add an almost equal share of votes to Democratic and Republican candidates, but those shares break down differently in some key swing states. So much for the creed (to which I’ve often genuflected) that high-turnout elections invariably favor the Democrats.
“The emerging electorate (18-24) is even less informed and less interested in politics.“
These Gen Z-er’s tend (and this is my gloss on the report) to cover a lack of information about issues and even the basic mechanics of voting with an all-purpose cynicism.
The Hidden Tribes report from More in Common fills in more details of this picture.
It divides the American electorate into seven groups, which map fairly well onto the Knight study’s breakdown, as so:
Note a couple of things about that graphic.
The four groups that the report lumps together as “The Exhausted Majority” total 67 percent of the electorate, while the activist/ideological segments – the Twitter/HuffPost/Fox/Breitbart gangs – comprise only 33 percent.
Traditional liberals and moderates – both engaged groups with higher voting rates – outnumber (by 23 percent to 8 percent) the progressive activists who so far have ruled the rhetoric of the Democratic primary.
The yellow bar – The Passive Liberals – represents a big chunk of the populace whom progressive activists hope to drive to the polls. Hidden Tribes’ description of them echoes the Knight report’s list of traits of chronic non-voters:
“Passive Liberals tend to feel isolated from their communities. They are insecure in their beliefs and try to avoid political conversations. They have a fatalistic view of politics and feel that the circumstances of their lives are beyond their control.“
In other words, good luck getting them to vote.
But, it’s not impossible.
Trump’s conspiratorial bombast and diabolically clever social media in 2016 did activate a number of chronic non-voters in the Hidden Tribes’ gray, Political Disengaged column. These votes helped make the difference for him in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania etc., while Hillary Clinton failed miserably to perform Obama-like magic in getting Passive Liberals to turn out.
The polls in 2016 were not as far off as current folklore believes, but when they missed, this is why: Their models of the electorate did not account sufficiently for how well Trump would do with people who couldn’t be bothered with McCain or Romney — and how poorly Hillary would do with Passive Liberals whom Obama briefly galvanized.
One piece of Obama’s success in 2012 was how well his team deployed then-new insights from academic research into what really leads a reluctant voter to cast a ballot.
We’ve tended to treat voting as a private, consumer decision – and to spend trillions on the same techniques Madison Avenue uses to get consumers to buy things they don’t really need or can’t afford: slick ads, clever slogans, direct mail, more slick ads.
Turns out, though, research this decade suggests voting is a much more social act than many of the gurus-for-hire thought. People are much more likely to vote when they hear or see that others in their social networks are going to vote, particularly when those people personally invite and encourage them to vote.
The Obama campaign put that research to good use in 2012 and now any number of apps and candidates are trying to take that approach to the next level. Trump’s use of social media tends to the same effect, reassuring the skeptical individualists to whom he appeals that voting for him makes them part of a winning crusade.
This one in November is going to be close.
I’d safely bet that it ends up getting decided far more by who makes the best use of the mounting research into the psychology of the infrequent voter – and far less by who has the most cutting ads or sharpest debate one-liners.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.