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October 30, 2006

GOTV

With a week to go to the election, the polls are flying hot and heavy. The Corner is currently showing a 26-seat pickup in the House and five in the Senate for the Democrats, a result that would flip the House and would deadlock the Senate at 50 seats each. (Can Vice President Cheney break ties from an undisclosed location?) Real Clear Politics is showing a four seat pickup for Democrats in the Senate and an 18-seat pickup in the House, numbers that would still flip the House but would allow the Vice President to stay out of the Senate (barely). But as experienced pols know, there's only one poll that matters, and that's the one taken on Election Day.

A big part of the reason for that is that preelection polls require a lot less work from the respondents. Someone calls your house, you pick up the phone, chat a few minutes, and your opinion is recorded. Come Election Day, however, a lot of people discover that they have more important things to do than drive down to the local polling station, stand in line, step into the booth, fill out their ballot, and submitting it. If that weren't the case, preelection polling would probably be pretty close to 100% accurate. But because pollsters have to try and predict who really will go vote when the time comes, preelection polls often miss the mark, sometimes badly.

GOTV, as politics mavens are well-aware, stands for Get Out The Vote, the efforts of political parties to make sure that their voters get to the polls. Many readers may already have been called by their local party to remind them to vote, and many more will get that call between now and next Tuesday. On Election Day itself, politicians across America will be getting the word out through as many channels as possible for their partisans to make sure they voted. After all, we'll probably only see about half of all registered voters actually bother to vote next Tuesday, and there are no quorum rules in American politics. The fact a majority of voting-age Americans won't cast a ballot on November 7 will not invalidate the election. They count whatever votes have been cast, and whoever gets a majority of those votes wins. Pushing people on your side to vote is therefore crucial to success in modern American politics.

Personally, I find that somewhere between frustrating and disgusting. It's bad enough that American politics has degenerated to sound bites and ludicrous accusations. But all that doesn't really matter that much, because when push comes to shove, the side that has a better GOTV operation in place is likely to win anyhow. Tom Schaller of TAPPED makes a good point in this vein in his look back at the 2004 elections, pointing out that Republican success is in no small part predicated on their excellent ground organization across the country (something Howard Dean is wisely attempting to replicate for the Democrats). This also explains a lot of the ads that we see this time of year: the goal is often not to convince someone to vote for you, but only to turn them off your opponent and maybe keep them from voting at all. After all, someone not voting at all keeps that vote from counting against the candidate, and if your GOTV operation is working well, you'll have enough votes to win.

There's a lot of logic in not voting, on the other hand. The odds of your vote actually mattering are pretty slender. Even in Florida in 2000, where the final tally had President Bush ahead only by a few hundred votes, that means the chances of your vote counting there were still perhaps one in a million. Given the hassles involved with voting, it's no surprise many people decide not to bother.

Nor would I advocate requiring people to vote, or giving people the day off to go vote. America is supposed to be about self-determination, and if you don't have the option to shirk your civic responsibilities, then you're not really free.

Still, it's hard not to be frustrated at the state of American politics today. We have two parties that differ only on the margins, both of whose raison d'etre is to get their hands on the levers of power in order to direct government largesse to their friends and allies, and like the weather, while many people aren't happy with the situation, few are interested in doing anything about it. At a time when we are fighting two difficult wars overseas and when more and more problems are seen as in the government's purview, it is disturbing to realize that the answers our government arrives at will be reached based more on the ability of political parties to get their voters to the polls than on the relative merits of those candidates.