Don’t Blame Voters for Average Turnout in California’s 2018 Primary Election
Donnie Fowler, June 7
I’m exhausted from the kvetching by media and political activists about the average turnout in California’s Tuesday primary elections. “My, oh, my!” they fret. “In the center of the ‘Resistance’ against Trump, why didn’t liberals overwhelm the polling places?”
Here’s why: Trump was not on the ballot. California’s Republicans, now a third party in our progressive enclave, are also really motivated to vote. And there is no functioning Democratic Party in the vast majority of counties.
First, Trump was not actually on the ballot on Tuesday in California. Most voters don’t vote only for symbolism or for some strategic reason. (“We’ll prove that Trump is a scourge on America by turning out for Gavin Newsom!”) Further, everyone knows that Democrats run and will run the state, so there’s no threat of imminent GOP takeover that will drive progressives to vote. This leaves only 7 congressional districts (of California’s 53 total districts) where Californians can actually make a direct anti-Trump statement by voting against a Republican incumbent congressman to make Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House again. As it turns out, turnout was not terrible — for either side.
The lesson: don’t confuse the time and energy that the tiny percentage of us activists devote to politics with the limited time and energy that most regular voters give to it. We are not normal. We are nerds.
Second, Republicans matched and even exceeded Democratic turnout in the 7 targeted Republican House districts for a couple of important reasons: those seats actually have lots of Republican voters in them and they probably feel under siege in blue California in the same way that we Democrats feel under siege in Trump’s America. In other words, Republicans can be motivated to get out and vote, too.
Third, there is no functioning Democratic Party in California that is capable of talking to and driving voters at the local level. For sure, a lot has has popped up here in the 18 months since Trump’s election — but a lot of that is extra-Party Resistance groups and independent expenditure campaign committees. (Here’s a question for another opinion piece: Why didn’t they join the state Democratic Party instead of doing their own thing?)
Winning elections requires very hard, very detailed, very un-sexy work over many years. Sure, there are official county Democratic parties in California, but how many of them have been truly organized, even professionalized, over several years? Almost none. God bless the very few worthy Party stalwarts who meet with each other a few times a year, but that’s not enough. Beyond some smart, clever political consultants who sell opinion polls and TV ads, not much was happening before November 2016 to regularly engage local Californians all year long.
Here’s a lesson from Ohio US Senator Sherrod Brown. On a trip to San Francisco last year, the progressive Democrat told a story about a choice he had when visiting a home-state college. On one side of campus was a group of about 10 “well-meaning” members of the College Democrats club. On another part of campus was a Black Lives Matter meeting with more than 100 people. “Where do you think I went?” he asked rhetorically. The California Democratic Party, as well as the national Democratic Party, might wish to become more like a movement and less like a stodgy, clubby institution.
In a time when political activism in California is at a fever pitch not seen in decades, blaming California’s rank-and-file voters for Tuesday’s average turnout is easy, but it ain’t the whole story.