As Democrats turn their attention to 2018, getting marginal voters to turn out will be crucial
by Sean McElwee at Salon
http://www.salon.com/2017/02/05/as-democrats-turn-their-attention-to-2018-getting-marginal-voters-to-turn-out-will-be-crucial/
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For this analysis, I look at a specific pool of voters: people who voted in the 2012 presidential election, but failed to turn out to vote in 2014. These voters are younger, more diverse, lower income and more Democratic than the voting population. If Democrats can mobilize these voters in a midterm, they can dramatically increase their chances. Progressives should see these voters as a key way to push Democratic members of Congress to the left.
The Missing Marginal Voters
I analyzed only Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) respondents who were matched to Catalist, a progressive voter file database, and reported voting in 2012. Among those respondents, 25 percent did not vote in 2014, and 75 percent did. For this analysis, I’ll compare those who voted in 2014 to those who did not. (For 2012 I am relying on the respondent’s recollection, whereas for 2014 I am relying on actual voter file data. CCES does not extract vote history data from Catalist.) To distinguish the group of 2012 voters and 2014 nonvoters from consistent nonvoters, I’ll refer to them as “marginal voters” (see here for a discussion of marginal voters).
First, I explored demographic differences between the 2014 voters and the marginal voters. For one thing, 2014 voters were 81 percent white, compared to 65 percent of the marginal voters. The marginal voters were lower income, with 31 percent earning less than $30,000 a year, compared with 21 percent of all voters. While 35 percent of marginal voters earned $60,000 or more a year, 47 percent of all voters did. Marginal voters were also younger, with an average age of 43, compared with an average age of 54 among all voters.
These marginal voters are more liberal on budget questions as well. I examined the generic budget-cutting question, which asks respondents whether they would prefer defense spending cuts, domestic spending cuts or tax hikes. Marginal voters prefer defense spending cuts (44 percent) over domestic cuts (36 percent) and tax hikes (20 percent). Voters, however, prefer domestic cuts (42 percent) over defense cuts (35 percent) and tax hikes (23 percent).
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