[EL] Iowa Turnout

Wed Jan 4 14:43:14 PST 2012

One factor to keep in mind that is I believe we're in a political
depression of sorts as far as Americans' views of politicians. It's hard
for candidates to earn voters' trust as a general matter, helping to
explain a series of remarkably law turnouts in elections for candidates in
races for governor and mayor last year. For example, see this chart showing
the turnout for mayor in the last election for mayor in our 22 largest
cities, including several races last year. San Francisco leads the way, but
with just 42% turnout of registered voters:
http://www.sfbetterelections.com/voter-turnout.html

In Iowa, the fact that the Democrats didn't have a competitive caucus and
the GOP caucus still only went up by a few thousand participants (to a
total not much more than half of the Democratic total in 2008) says
something about this political depression.

And while the GOP race was close, only Ron Paul seemed to generate
excitement among new voters. It's rather interesting how the GOP field
mirrors the 2008 field, meaning the choices weren't particularly fresh.
Here's how I would translate/define the top finishers from 2008 and 2012:

2008                       2012
Mitt Romney           Romney    -- corporate wing/establishment
Ron Paul                Paul         -- libertarian wing that is growing
stronger
Mike Huckabee       Santorum  -- social conservative with a touch of
populism
Fred Thompson       Perry        -- great, late-arriving hope as an
alternative for the corporate wing, who then flops
John McCain           Gingrich    -- senior figure from inside the beltway,
with a history of being a rebel

Rob

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 5:25 PM, Charles Stewart III <cstewart at mit.edu>wrote:

>  **1.      ** There is an old article in the Journal of Politics by Gary
> Cox and Mike Munger showing that close congressional races induce greater
> turnout in those races.  I reproduced their results in both editions of
> Analyzing Congress, for more recent House races.  The interesting thing is
> that you get turnout increases in House districts when the House race is
> close, even in presidential election years, when we tend to think that
> turnout is driven only by interest in the presidential race.****
>
> **2.      **The closest thing to an answer to this question is based on
> looking at self-reported turnout in House elections as a function of where
> survey respondents place congressional candidates on ideological scales.
> Respondents who report that they perceive a big ideological difference
> between candidates are more likely to report voting in the race than
> respondents who report that they perceive a small (or no) ideological
> difference between candidates.  I’m sure you can spot the problems with
> causal inference in this regularity.****
>
> **3.      **I hope to post up something soon about where the
> “non-of-the-above” vote in Iowa came from, at least geographically.****
>
> ** **
>
> Charles****
>
> ** **
>
> *From:* law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:
> law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] *On Behalf Of *Doug Hess
> *Sent:* Wednesday, January 04, 2012 4:11 PM
> *To:* Election Law
> *Subject:* [EL] Iowa Turnout****
>
> ** **
>
> Some thoughts/questions on the IA turnout (from a native of the tall corn
> state):****
>
>  ****
>
> 1. Is it generally true that when the public perceives an election to be
> close that turnout rises? If so, was that the case in IA? The press
> coverage I heard...well, ok, NPR (hi, Overby!)...seemed to portray it as
> "too close to call", etc. ****
>
>  ****
>
> 2. What about diversity in choice, is that believed to boost increased
> turnout? Assuming moderates in the GOP generally support Romney (Huntsman
> provides an alternative for those voters to Romney, but he didn't really
> run in Iowa), it seems there was a range of candidates for non-moderates to
> pick from. That is to say: Santorum, Paul, and Romney seem to ****
>
> have little in common. Perhaps no more than what campaigns in the past
> have had, but it does seem a crowded field. ****
>
>  ****
>
> 3. Unrelated to the above: that the candiates outside of the top three got
> 29% of the vote, which might be an interesting indication of diversity
> itself, you wonder how much of that adds up to anti-Romney votes. One can
> imagine a gulf between Paul supporters and others, but how does the 15%
> that Perry and Bachman received breakdown for Romney and Santorum? If the
> trend runs against Romney, is the real data from the caucus spelling bad
> news for Romney? ****
>
>  ****
>
> Doug ****
>
>  ****
>
> ============****
>
> From: Michael McDonald <mmcdon at gmu.edu>
> To: law-election at uci.edu
> Cc:
> Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:21:23 -0500
> Subject: [EL] Iowa Turnout
> I posted the turnout numbers here:****
>
> http://elections.gmu.edu/Turnout_2012P.html****
>
> There are a total of 122,255 votes in the Republican caucus according to
> the
> Google data table provided in partnership with the Iowa Republican Party
> and
> the Democrats report "more than 25,000" people turned out for their
> caucuses.****
>
> The Google site reports the Cain and Roemer votes, too. Cain's 54 votes and
> Roemer's 31 votes are more that the 8 vote victory margin. One of the
> things
> that is perplexing me is that there are 252 votes unaccounted for when all
> the candidate votes are tallied...Write-ins? Uncommitted?****
>
> My take is that participation in the Republican caucus kept pace with the
> population growth of the state over the past four years. Furthermore, as a
> likely consequence of an uncontested Democratic nomination, the entrance
> polls report that this year independents comprised 23% of caucusgoers while
> four years ago they constituted 11%. Thus, there appears to be a small dip
> in enthusiasm among Republicans compared to 2008. Perhaps the Tea Party
> enthusiasm from 2010 has run its course, so Republicans should not count on
> a replication of 2010 conditions in 2012. Still, overall levels of
> participation remain elevated, so if there is a retrenchment in turnout
> from
> the high 2008 levels, there is no indication of a wholesale collapse. Of
> course, Iowa is only one state with a caucus system. The upcoming primaries
> may provide better indicators and we have a lot of territory to cover
> before
> November.****
>
> ============
> Dr. Michael P. McDonald
> Associate Professor, George Mason University
> Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution****
>
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