Demographic shifts and voter turnout in the 2014 midterm elections

Politics

As was expected, the Republicans took the House and Senate in the 2014 mid-term elections, shifting the balance of power in the United States government. The election was viewed by many as a referendum on President Obama's policies. The President said it (Martosko, 2014), conservative talking heads said it (Krauthammer, 2014), and voters in exit polls said as much, too (Raedle, 2014). This argument makes for fine political rhetoric, this ignores the fact that Obama ran for re-election in 2012. The ACA had been passed but nobody had seen its benefits yet, only heard the fearmongering. The economy was going nowhere fast in 2012, versus two strong quarters in 2014, and the unemployment rate has been declining for four straight years. If there was a time when a referendum on Obama's policies was going to cost him, it would have been in 2012, not the 2014 midterms. Unless of course it was a way to punish the President without having to actually elect a Republican to the White House.

So what was the cause of the results in the 2014 midterms? Was it a referendum on Obama's policies, or is that just smoke? The broad trends show Democratic strength in Presidential elections going forward, but the Electoral College is not the same thing as Congressional elections, and mid-terms are different from Presidential elections. With those realities in mind, this paper will examine some of the drivers of the recent patterns of elections.

Demographics

The first issue is with demographics, because there are different patterns in who votes in mid-terms vs. who votes in Presidential elections. Turnout is far lower, and it is lower among groups who typically vote Democrat. In 2008, 46% of voters were between 18-44, and they voted heavily in favor of Obama. In the 2014 midterms, they accounted for 32% of the electorate. This represents millions of voters who skew heavily Democratic staying home, and the result on the mid-term results was predictable. Older voters, 54% of the electorate in 2012, were 67% of the electorate in 2014 (Judis, 2014).

This is just raw numbers, and does not take into account race, wherein Democratic voters also stayed home. While Obama not only carried upwards of 90% of the African-American vote, he also mobilized African-Americans to vote. Normally, African-Americas are among the most disenfranchised of all groups in America, but they made a point to vote for Obama, and that took other Democrats along with him. Not only was there no black President on the bill, but many Democratic candidates were shying away from associations with Obama and his policies. Whatever they were thinking, it failed miserably.

Macro-Level Trends

In his book Nixonland, Perlstein argues that Richard Nixon was responsible for the polarization of American politics that we see today. Nixon argued that America was essentially split between the elites and the working class, and that this overarching narrative continues today. What is interesting is that this narrative is utilized by both parties. In terms of caricature, the GOP has the "liberal elite" and "takers" as enemies that their working class must fear. Democrats have "the 1%" and racist hillbillies as their boogeymen. This plays itself out quite well for the midterm voting patterns, it seems. In 2006, the liberal elite were so angry at Bush they turned out to defeat him; in 2014 the hillbillies vented their irrational anger.

Since the 1970s, politics in America has not necessarily been driven by Nixon's dichotomy -- which would favor the middle class every time by numbers -- but by the ways in which both parties have cobbled together uneasy alliances between both privileged and less-privileged groups. The Republicans have, on balance, done well to attract the groups that vote in every election. Older voters have always trended conservative, something that has not changed, though it might now as young people during Nixon's era are older voters now. But where these alliances come together to form policy is perhaps the most interesting battleground. The Democratic Party, which is not nearly as liberal as their opponents make them out to be, nevertheless promotes policies popular with educated liberals and minorities alike. Thus, we see young voters overwhelmingly support Obama, even if many of them were thrown under the bus, so to speak, with the ACA, having to pay more for their health care plans so that the uninsured can receive coverage. The ACA works because this is a trade-off most young people are willing to make.

The Republican voters tend to be more diligent voters, and that work in their favor. For instance, there was no real doubt going into this midterm that the Republicans were going to win, and win big. Their supporters were easy to mobilize -- the older, wealthier types always vote, and the white middle class, well, low information voters being told to be angry about everything are apt to be angry, but clueless. This is why these voters give Congress a low approval rating, but vote the same people back into power in Congress anyway.

The two parties have taken the split in America that Perlstein describes as having been inherited from Nixon, and found some common ground in certain groups. In the long-run, the demographics favor the Democrats, but this is not the case in mid-terms. The role that fear plays was mentioned by Krauthammer and Edsall as causal factors in the 2014 vote. Political campaigners have long asked us, or told us, to fear others. This is the more important element of Perlstein's argument, the fear. Ultimately, it does not matter what group joins what side, just that the different groups have fear of each other. Republicans, knowing that they need some more Hispanic and African-American votes, have sought to court those groups by offering homophobic and anti-abortion rhetoric, an appeal to emotion based on religion. This tactic failed, but it shows that fear is seen as a motivator. These arguments did not create enough fear to change many minds, but there was enough respect for the power of fear as an argument that the attempt was made.

Social media and the 24-hour infotainment cycle have also exacerbated the fear factor. Today there are multiple voices telling you what to fear. You hear the same argument, phrased in slightly different ways, from a number of voices. This makes the argument much more convincing than if you only heard it from a couple of sources. The proliferation of media has made appeals to emotion easier than would have been possible in Nixon's day. People could certainly cultivate fear back then -- they have always been able to do that, but today we have much greater ability to create that fear narrative; such appeals to emotion unsurprisingly result in irrational responses.

Mobilization

One of the changes in recent elections is that the parties have become better at mobilizing their supporters, both for fundraising and for getting people out to vote. What was once a time-consuming process using paper records and manual telephones has been automated and streamlined. Not only is it easier to gather more information but it is easier to refine the information that has been gathered. While this has doubtless helped the gerrymandering efforts that made 2014 look easy, it also has allowed the parties to get more supporters to the polls. The Democrats had a competitive advantage in analytics, and in social media, in both 2008 and 2012, and Edsall (2014) argues that the Republican Party has closed this gap, a factor that might have contributed to their success in the recent midterms. Mobilization efforts are especially strong in swing districts and swing states, where single votes can matter. Improved funding -- the ability to raise money from SuperPACs and corporations -- has helped place more emphasis on mobilization, because the parties can afford to spend to get their people to the polls.

The Economy

A lot of elections boil down to the state of the economy. This is interesting, because the level of economic literacy in the U.S. is extremely low, even among the educated. Thus we have an interesting situation where an electorate can find plausible claims that "this is the weakest recovery.." As Krauthammer blathers without a hint of irony, or that the President is responsible for gas prices, but only when they feed into your confirmation bias, or whatever other nonsense is floating around. The economy is, in fact, a mixed bag right now. Conservative ranting about the economy is almost always wrong, but left-wing memes proclaiming Obama's economic wizardry are more than just a little hyperbolic. The issue that drives elections is the one issue most Americans no almost nothing about.

People do know about how much money they make however, and that feeds right back into the polarization, the same one Perlstein proposed. Republicans want you to fear the other side, because they will tax you and give it to some freeloader. Democrats want you to fear the Republican plutocracy. Economic reality is far more complex than that, but these ideas are distilled into political rhetoric, and feed into the fear.

Conclusion

If there is one overriding factor in recent elections it is fear. Perlstein made the point that Nixon promoted a bifurcation of the American electorate. But the politics of fear have always been able to generate support. In mid-term elections, at least in the past twenty years, the fear side always comes out to vote. They elect a Congress that opposes the President, perhaps in the theory that this will create the sort of balance that can prevent this President that they fear from ruining the country. It does not really matter what you are afraid of, which is why this fall it was ISIS, and Ebola, and software that didn't work a year ago. In 2016, maybe we can have new bogeymen. You can be sure you'll hear about how voting Republican in 2014 gave us gridlock, and how the 1% are hijacking our democracy, and we'll probably be asked by someone, somewhere, to fear the uterus, too.

One of the things that stands out the most about 2008 is that it seemed like the one election that was not about fear. This was masterful framing, if nothing else, to have a nation that was entering recession and embroiled in a couple of Middle Eastern quagmires, voting on something other than fear. But today we are back to a fear-dominated political culture. The battle lines have been clearly delineated, perhaps more so today than ever before. And that is why demographics, media and mobilization matter more than ever before, because when your demographic doesn't vote as much as the other guy's, you lose. It's not really a referendum on policies, other than in broad. Obama could have been turfed in 2012, and most people who claim to be angry about the ACA aren't even affected by it. Those were never going to be Obama voters. There has not been a sea change in the sentiment of the American people, either. The 2014 midterms were mostly a reflection of the status quo in terms of the fear and conflict between two classes of American people, and a reflection of who showed up to express that at the ballot box, and who did not.