Take a look at these registration numbers from key states and tell me whether or not Donald Trump might have benefitted from an actual ground game:
Take the critical battleground of North Carolina, for example. Between June 2015 and today, total registrations have increased 5.4 percent in the 70 counties where whites without a college degree make up a majority of eligible voters (Romney carried those counties with 62 percent). But in the 30 other less white, better-educated counties, registrations have increased 6.8 percent over the same period (Obama carried those with 59 percent of the vote).
The story is the same in Pennsylvania. Since May 2015, registrations have increased 4.9 percent in the 63 counties where a majority of potential voters are non-college-educated white people. But in the other four counties (Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery and Chester), registrations have risen 6.3 percent. Those four more-cosmopolitan counties combined for an Obama margin of 611,724 votes in 2012, nearly twice his statewide margin of victory.
In Florida, registration growth has been roughly even across the map: It’s up 4.7 percent in the 53 counties where a majority of voters are non-college-educated whites (58 percent Romney) since June 2015, versus 4.4 percent in the other 14 counties that are more diverse or well-educated (58 percent Obama). But Florida also tracks registration by race, and non-whites have accounted for 59 percent of the state’s net registration growth since November 2014.
In Virginia, the disparity is even greater. Between June 2015 and the end of August, net registrations have increased just 2.9 percent in the 85 white, non-college-graduate majority localities (58 percent Romney), versus 4.8 percent in the 48 other localities (57 percent Obama).
There may be multiple factors contributing to these numbers, but one of them is surely that Clinton and the Democrats have organizers on the ground and a sophisticated plan for registering their voters, while Trump is relying almost wholly on the RNC and doesn’t seem to believe that he needs to engage in the nuts and bolts of running a presidential campaign.
In any case, it appears that Trump is losing ground from where Romney fought and lost in 2012. If Trump is going to win, it will be persuading a lot of Obama voters to go for him because he hasn’t inspired a disproportionate wave of disengaged white working class voters to go out and get themselves registered.
I’ve been following these numbers and this is encouraging, but Clinton still needs to turn out Obama voters. Even if Trump doesn’t generate a whole bunch of new registrations, Obama had a huge youth turnout and African-American turnout. Even a healthy Latino turnout. I’m hopeful Clinton can get most of them to the polls but she’s struggling with young folks. She should do very well with Latinos but the numbers out of Nevada don’t look so good, at least if the polls are to be believed. I think Trump’s getting something like 30% of that cohort.
If she gets a solid bump in the polls from the debate, as appears to be happening, and if it holds, everything’s good. If we wind up back in a dead heat, anything could happen in which case the ground game is great to have but there’s no guarantee it will be enough.
I hate to be a wet blanket here, but maybe this just reflects larger total population growth in urban and more cosmopolitan areas – that seems to be a nationakl trend.
Nothing wrong with that – if that’s the case.
Just part of the favorable demographic change for the non-Republican folks.
Our county is consistently about a 70-30 GOP county, so our goal is simply to increase Dem turnout to help with Statewide numbers and down ballot candidates. At this point, absentee ballot requests from Democrats this cycle are up 93% over 2012. Republican requests are up, also, but only at half the rate of the Democrats.
There has been a pretty concerted effort in this area by the Clinton campaign to focus on registering new voters, particularly young voters. I am wondering if these numbers could reflect some success in that regard. Also, even though we have a relatively small Latino population in our County, we have been been issuing a lot of information in Spanish concerning voter registration and the importance of early voting. For the first time, we are also handing out bilingual slate cards for Democratic Candidates, from President all the way down to state and local candidates. We have never before done this in our County, but it is a pleasant surprise how much interest there has been.
Least talked about story of this cycle.
The lack of Democratic Volunteers to do GOTV. You cannot do GOTV without volunteers.
Susan Smith in Florida tells me they are way down. Same in Iowa. Same in New Hampshire. Same in Colorado. Legal Protection in Florida is way down.
The Dem effort isn’t close to 2012. And that effort was not as good as 2008.
Volunteers come in two varieties: Party types and leftish activist types. The Sanders people make up a large percentage of the activists, and while they are voting for Clinton they are aren’t volunteering. You can see this too in small dollar donations – which are down about 60% as well.
Maybe the debate performance brings them out.
But the GOP isn’t the only party with a GOTV problem
I get the feeling that is also true in my state. I know locally, there is definitely a smaller volunteer presence. FWIW, and this is strictly an anecdotal observation on my part, while there are some very top flight people I have encountered who are doing yeoman’s work for Clinton, the Clinton machine just does not always seem to have the same finely operation that Obama had in 2012. Just doesn’t always seem to be a good interconnection to the larger operation. It might not be that way everywhere, but that’s how it feels in my little corner of the state.
I obviously don’t live in a swing state but I’ve been called more in this election than I ever have before.
Same story in Milwaukee. OFA had a big presence here in 2012 and they were effective in the suburbs. This year the Clinton campaign seems to have farmed the effort out to the DP regulars, and the difference shows. It’s a defensible decision, I guess, inasmuch as (and as long as) Clinton is polling strong enough to win and the Republican support for Trump is weak.
It’s not how to go about piling up a big, crushing, victory that would humiliate Trump and purge the right wing out of the government though. Or help the Wisconsin DP beat Walker two years down the road. I see no evidence here that the Clinton campaign ever entertained that kind of a strategy, ever conceived of that kind of a win.
It’s like they wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of power if they had it so they don’t really want it.
A few weeks ago team Clinton was trumpeting that she would win in a landslide. So, doubt that they lack to desire for that much power.
But my point was that what they say doesn’t make sense in light of what they do. And this is a classic example. Assume the Democrats put together the kind of campaign machine that they had in OFA as recently as four years ago. They must still have the tools, they must still know the people who can do this, no? Assume they use this machine to win not only the Presidency but a majority of the Senate and many if not a majority of the House seats. As you point out, they told us they’d win in a landslide; this is what a landslide would look like, no? If you want to rule, you need power. That would be power.
That kind of a campaign is not what I’m seeing in Wisconsin. Are you seeing it where you live? Maybe Wisconsin is an anomaly; if so it would be worth knowing in an academic sort of way.
Or maybe Wisconsin isn’t an anomaly. I don’t doubt at all that Clinton wants to win; she’s been running for President since 1992 so no other theory makes sense. But the difference between just “winning” (adequate for her) and “winning big” (aspirational for us, dreaming the impossible dream) is that if she wins big she has to govern big, and that runs her right up against the fundamental contradiction of the Democratic Party, between its constituents and its voters. But if she just wins the Democrats control the administration and can hand out all the goodies to their constituents while the Republicans insure that they don’t have to deliver on their promises to the voters.
Liberals — including our esteemed host — have a model in which the Democrats want to deliver “good government” (using a class-neutral definition of ‘good’) while Republicans have gone barking mad. In this model, one party is “broken” while the other is still in some sense “intact.” If the Democrats really did want to deliver “good government” one good way to start would be to win the election in a big way.
On the other hand if both parties are broken in different but symmetrical ways, that would explain a lot of things about the Democrats’ and the Republicans’ campaigns — but where does it leave liberalism?
No, WI isn’t an anomaly.
We more or less agree, but how and why is a much larger issue than I can express in a comment. So, will leave it for now.
Do they have a coordinated campaign in WI? They have done this in some states.
OFA in 2008 was kind of separate from the Party in Florida.
They have what they call a “coordinated campaign”, yes.
OFA was drastically separate from the DP here in 2008 and 2012 both. Basically OFA said “jump” and the DP said “how high?” Our perception was that OFA did not trust the DPW to execute so they kept them on a very short leash and given the way that everything worked out when they were not closely supervised (in 2010, June 2012, 2014) that was exactly the right call. Which makes the absence of anything like OFA seem all the more unusual. As I said above I can see it as a defensible policy given finite resources and/or confidence of victory but it still seems odd.
I think there was always an undercurrent of thinking in the Party that OFA was wrong to be so separate.
OFA in my opinion is right: I would truth the local parties with very little.
The transition to a coordinated campaign makes some sense, but I think it is why the volunteers are so much lower. A lot of Bernie people just aren’t comfortable with the Party types.
Question: Was this a generalized OFA strategy or selectively applied in states where the state Democratic Party was weaker than the potential size of the Democratic electorate?
FL and WI would seem to me to be in that category. OTOH, it guaranteed that the state party would remain weak and not perform well in the midterm elections.
WI is certainly in that category and you’re right: OFA’s strategy, though effective, did have the side effect of ensuring that the state party remained weak or became even weaker. The causality is complicated but 2 patterns emerge:
Over time the party becomes dominated by elected officials who owe their positions to the leadership, while the activists lose interest or walk away in active disgust. Which in turn makes it even harder for dissidents to gain traction.
Big fish in little ponds can create problems if their guy isn’t the nominee and they don’t go away easily.
A thought is how the state and local officials that run as delegates and the superdelegates were stacking up before the primaries. By early Feb ’08 more than half the superdelegates had declared for a candidate and it was 241 Clinton and 181 Obama. Earlier Clinton had a 2:1 lead in superdelegates. I’m sure that both candidates maintained lists of all of them and who was privately with them.
Easier to see this time around because near 90% were with HRC before any voting took place. But we can see that MI and FL were with HRC early on in ’08 and created problems for the party. So, not surprising that OFA would run FL. (Makes Obama’s 2011 choice of DWS for DNC chair more curious.)
The old GOTV strength in the Democratic Party was unions. And it takes a lot of money to replace that and such replacements don’t so easily carry-forward to the next election. Rather stupid for Obama and national Democrats to turn their back on WI union teachers.
the Clinton campaign seems to have farmed the effort out to the DP regulars
But of course since the HVF was raising huge amounts of money for state Democratic parties. Not much was allowed to remain within the state party coffers through the first quarter of 2016, but I’m sure HVF has since corrected that.
Sorry — “HVF” is…?
Hillary Victory Fund.
Dear lord. So glad I’m not in the DP. They seriously call it that?
Not exclusive to the DP and not new in this election cycle. Don’t know when the first one came into existence, but it seems to have originated as a means to raise the money a nominee and party could raise and spend above what federal campaign funding supplied. Might have been instrumental in GWB having money to challenge the 2000 election while Gore was essentially broke.
McCain (the last major party nominee to accept GE federal funding) had a victory fund. As did Obama in ’08 and ’12 and Romney in ’12. It doesn’t increase the hard dollar amounts a candidate or the party can receive from donors, but it does allow for soft money to be used for administrative costs.
The HVF is unique because it is taking advantage of the McCutcheon decision and was set up in 2015 and not after she won the nomination.
One small example from using a victory fund vehicle. If a supporter purchased a $30 t-shirt from the Sanders’ campaign, the $30 was a hard-money contribution and the costs associated with supplying the t-shirt were campaign costs. The Clinton campaign transferred its campaign store to HVF. The $30 hit the campaign books as a donation, but the costs were absorbed by HVF soft money.
Even in 2004 it felt like a social network was being created. And certainly it was extended in 2008 and 2012.
This effort is led by Party people – different crowd.
Lacking a ground game will probably hurt Trump, but there is a third option besides getting more people registered and winning over Obama voters. Trump could win if he gets a larger portion of the Romney voters than Clinton gets of the Obama voters.
According to Gallup the intent to vote is lower than in any election this millennium, and has decreased more for Democrats than Republicans.
If they had a less pathological candidate more willing to do the unglamorous work it really might be possible to roll to victory with ethnic nativism. There are a lot of whites in the country.
Yes there are a lot of us whites in the country. But a lot of us simply aren’t xenophobic, racist lunatics.
but how mamy of the non xenophobes have college degrees? Most of those vote. A candidate with less pathology that Trump and a good ground game might go far simply because the pool is bigger.
Then again if Palin, Obama, Trump cant activate these voters maybe nothing will.
Been wondering about that myself. My community is disproportionately white, and tends to be below average in terms of college degrees. Seems like an awful lot of folks in this demographic where I live move around an awful lot. Life throws some bad breaks, and establishing residency long enough to avoid updating voter registration can be darned difficult. I guess it’s my long-winded way of wondering how much of it is motivation and how much is economic? If you’re in dire enough straits, making sure that one’s registration is current is going to be low on the list of priorities. Could be wrong about that. Just speculation.
2012:
White voters: 72% — 39% Obama and 59% Romney
Some high sch– 3% — 64% Obama and 35% Romney
high school — 21% – 51% Obama and 48% Romney
some college – 29% – 49% Obama and 48% Romney
college grad – 29% – 47% Obama and 51% Romney
When do we begin talking about all the stupid college graduates?
Just to clarify: The education numbers above are for all voters not just white voters. That threw me off for a second.
Along the same lines from the Washington Post:
White non-college
Trump 65%
Clinton 25%
Romney 61%
Obama 36%
White college
Trump 46%
Clinton 45%
Romney 56%
Obama 42%
77% of white college graduates vote as opposed to 53% of non-college whites so the potential for a hidden Trump surge is based firmly around non-college whites. Colleged whites are baked into the cake as it were.
Can’t helping thinking back to Booman talking about how Clinton will succeed with white voters compated to Obama. Called that one rather badly.
Trump doesn’t prepare. Trump doesn’t listen to advisers. Trump apparently has the attention span of a 3 YO. It’s very concerning.
The whole “not prepare” thing led to the amazing Debate 1, where the mighty figure of Rosie O’Donnell, the great Satan in the Trump concept of the world, arose from obscurity to be mentioned. Amazing.
“Not prepare” means “voters take care of themselves”. Of course, downticket Republicans had better batten down the hatches. As you point out with such accuracy, voters in high R districts are not being registered. The Senate may be tipping back D.
And the window for voter registration is about to close. Whatever differences that exist now are going to be locked in about 1 m before the election.
I’d say what is most concerning is that Trump’s deficiencies are the root of his appeal.
In my little world, I get the feeling the debate let everyone know how petty and small of a person Donald Trump is. Believe it or not, I think people sort of knew, but didn’t really see, the extent of his narcissitic authority complex. Talked to two mellinial colleagues today–Bernie supporters–who are now in for Hillary. Are they excited? Not exactly. But we discussed how there’s something to be said for normalcy and Trump would take us far from it.
Clinton will win as long as Strongman Trump is out in public being Strongman Trump.
Otherwise, Strongman Trump is allowed to be portrayed as PresidentialAsFuckTM by simply not retweeting white supremacists.
Meanwhile, the media will focus on the smoke coming out of the HRC smoke machine, and asking pointed questions about the obvious raging fire hiding just around the corner that we all know just has to be there.
Questions like, whether Clinton has Parkinsons, and how it is going to affect her Presidency. What those 30,000,000 emails that she personally deleted really said. And of course, just who Clinton was high-fiving as her personally-directed assault on Benghazi was taking place. And let’s not forget about the clear as crystal corruption of the Clinton Foundation giving liquid cash to state AG’s investigating it, getting the charges immediately dropped.
All things being equal, Strongman Trump would win. It’s basically 2000 all over again. This is a “future ratings” election, where media morons salivate at an inept bumbling moron in the White House…never mind what can actually happen when that inept bumbling moron surrounds himself with efficient and effective demons.
If Clinton is interested in winning, she’ll continue to bait Strongman Trump into being Strongman Trump in public.
And we’ll all be treated to the media making larger and more asinine statements about how BothSidesDoItTM, in order to keep this thing a horse race, i.e. stealable.