Latest / The Fine Print of Democracy / The Fine Print of Voter Turnout
Transcript
- Jake: Welcome to the Fine Print of Democracy, a Civics podcast that explores the overlooked rules, processes, and institutions that shape American government. I'm Jake, a civics teacher breaking down the ideas behind our system of government and the conversations that help us better understand it. Each Thursday episode begins with the reading of a fine print article, followed by teachers' notes, a conversation about the questions, misconceptions, and connections that come up when we teach these ideas in the classroom. Because understanding government isn't just about knowing the rules, it's about understanding why those rules exist and why they matter. Today Voter turnout. The fine print of voter turnout. Persuasion gets the attention, but turnout wins the election. Most people think elections are about convincing undecided voters, and that's part of it, but in reality, most campaigns spend far more time turning out supporters than persuading new ones. Voter turnout is usually more reliable and more impactful than persuasion. Let's define these terms. Turnout means getting people who already support a candidate to actually vote. Persuasion means convincing someone to change their mind or choose a particular candidate. In modern US politics, where partisanship is stronger than almost any point in history, most voters are going to consistently vote with the same party. And truly undecided voters are a small slice of the electorate. Citizens may identify or officially register as an independent, but when it comes time to vote, they vote for the same party election after election. That consistency is a big part of why turnout matters more than persuasion. Persuasion is hard. People have firmly held beliefs, and many aren't willing to budge on that. For example, Canada A is in favor of increased gun restrictions, and Candidate B is in favor of less restrictions on gun ownership. If a voter owns multiple guns and is the supporter of candidate B, Canada A will be wasting their time trying to persuade the voter to change their vote because they have a fundamental disagreement. A better use of Canada A's time is reaching out to voters who may not vote every election but have shown support of increased gun restrictions. In the time Canada A spends trying and failing to convince one voter, They could reach 10 less engaged supporters and remind them to vote. As the election draws nearer, campaigns shift their focus to GOTV, get out the vote. When the election gets closer, persuasion becomes even more difficult. To persuade voters, it often takes multiple conversation over a period of time, and with just a few weeks or days until election day, the time needed to persuade voters is not there. But supporters of a candidate or an issue may just need a reminder to go to vote on election day or fill out their ballot and return it to a ballot drop off location. Turnout is predictable, persuasion is not. Meaning campaigns can count on getting more of their own people to show up, but they can't count on changing anyone's mind. Campaigns don't win by finding new supporters as much as they win by activating the ones they already have. The fine print of modern elections is this there aren't that many minds left to change, but there are plenty of votes left on the table. The campaigns that find them and turn them out are the ones that win. And that is the fine print of voter turnout. Whenever I teach these topics, the most interesting conversations often happen after the explanation is finished. Every lesson has a few things that don't always fit on the page, so let's move beyond the textbook and into teachers' notes. The questions students ask, the misconceptions we unpack, and the conversations that make civics worth teaching. This one's a little different from some of the other fine print posts because voter turnout isn't necessarily something you sit down and teach as its own unit or lesson. You might talk about elections, campaigns, voting, or civic participation, and then voter turnout turnout comes up naturally. But it's not usually a topic where you're standing in front of the class thinking, okay, today teaching ins and out voter turnout. And that's actually why I think it's an interesting topic to bring into a classroom. If I were teaching this, I wouldn't necessarily start with a question of why people don't vote. I'd start with a more basic question. What does a campaign actually spend its time trying to accomplish? Because I think most of us have a pretty specific picture in their heads when we hear the word campaign. We imagine candidates giving speeches, running ads, knocking on doors, and trying to convince people that they're the better choice. And that's certainly part of it, but there is another side of campaigning that is much less exciting to watch, but incredibly important. Getting people who already support you to actually participate. That's the distinction I'd want students to understand. Supporting a candidate and voting for that candidate aren't exactly the same thing. A person can have a strong preference and still not vote. They can be busy, they can forget, they may not know an election is happening, they may assume their vote won't matter. Or they may simply be someone who doesn't participate consistently. That Difference between preference and participation is really the heart of this post. And I think it's a useful distinction well beyond elections, too. We do this all the time when we talk about civic engagement. We look at whether people care about an issue and assume that caring will naturally lead to action, but it doesn't always work that way. You can care about something without attending a meeting. You can support a cause without volunteering. You can agree with a candidate without actually filling out a ballot. Those are all different steps. And if I were having having this conversation with students, I'd probably spend some time on that distinction before even getting into the campaign strategy side of things. I'd I I'd also want to slow down on the word persuasion. Because when we say a campaign is trying to persuade voters, that can sound like every voter is sitting around waiting to be convinced. That's not really how modern elections work. People bring existing beliefs, identities, experiences, and political preferences with them. For many voters, the decision isn't going to be dramatically changed by one campaign ad or or one conversation at the door. That doesn't mean persuasion never happens, it obviously does and can, but it does mean we shouldn't imagine the electorate as one giant group of undecided voters waiting for somebody to make the perfect argument. And this is probably where I'd connect briefly to my previous post about young voters. There, I talked about the difference between caring about politics and actually participating in elections. This is the same basic idea from a different direction. The question isn't just who supports this, it's it's also who is actually going to show up. But I wouldn't make young voters the focus here because the larger point applies to basically every group of voters. And that gets us to another assumption we make about turnout. We tend to talk about it in very broad terms, without always stopping to ask what the numbers are actually even telling us. And that's something I'd want to slow down on in a classroom because voter turnout is one of those topics where statistic can sound pretty straightforward until you look at what it what is actually being measured. This is one of those places where I think civics and basic data literacy overlap. You don't necessarily need to turn it into a statistics lesson, but but you can teach you can teach students a really useful habit. Before accepting a number as an explanation, ask what the number is actually measuring. Because a percentage by itself doesn't really tell you all that much. If I tell you that voter turnout was 60%, you might think you understand what that means. But 60% of whom? If we're measuring turnout among registered voters, that's one thing. If we're measuring turnout against a voting eligible population, that's something different. The number hasn't changed, but the group we're measuring has. And that matters because the the the the denominator can change the story. This is a really common problem when we talk about statistics. We see a number and immediately want to explain it, compare it, or use it to make some larger point. But before we do any of that, we need to know what the number actually represents. And once you start asking that question, You you realize there are a few different pieces of context hiding behind a turnout number. And one of the biggest is the election itself. Turnout for what election? Presidential elections, midterms, state elections, local elections, primaries, and special elections don't all attract the same level of participation. So if you see a turnout number without knowing what kind of election produced it, you're missing some pretty important context. And that's where I think this becomes a useful civics lesson. The the goal isn't for students to memorize a bunch of turnout percentages. It's to get them into the habit of slowing down when you see a statistic and asking, okay, what exactly is this telling me? And sometimes the most important part of a number is the part that isn't immediately visible. That can be a really easy classroom exercise too. Give students two turnout statistics and ask them to tell you what they think the difference means. Then give them the context. Maybe one is a presidential election and one is a local election. Maybe one measures registered voters and another uses the voting eligible population. Suddenly, the lesson isn't really about memorizing a turnout percentage, it's about learning how to interrogate a statistic. And honestly, I think that's a much more valuable skill. Now, I I I've also seen this distinction firsthand from working on campaigns. There's a tendency to picture campaign work as one long effort to convince people to change their minds, when in reality, a lot of the work is much more practical than that. You're trying to figure out who supports you. Who is likely to participate and who hasn't participated yet? And how you can make sure people who intend to vote actually follow through with that plan. That's not nearly as dramatic as a candidate delivering a big speech, but it's it's an important part of what campaigns actually do. And there's a lesson in that for students too, because campaigns are organizations. They have limited time, limited money, limited volunteers, and a finite number of days before an election. So they have to make decisions about where those resources go. And that's another place where the distinction between persuasion and turnout becomes useful. If a campaign has 10 hours of volunteer time, let's say, it has to decide what those volunteers should actually do with those 10 hours. That turns campaign strategy into something students can analyze without needing to agree with the candidate or party involved. You can ask what is the campaign trying to accomplish? Who are they trying to reach? What information do they have? What assumptions are they making? And how would they know whether their strategy works? Those are really just critical thinking questions. But elections give you a pretty interesting real world setting for them. And I think that's ultimately the classroom takeaway I'd want from this particular post. Not that turnout is more important than persuasion, or that or that one kind of campaign activity is inherently better than another. It's that elections are made up of more steps than we usually see. There are people making arguments, there are people deciding what they believe, there are people deciding whether to participate. There are organizations trying to reach those people, and then there is the very simple act of actually casting a ballot. When we reduce all of that to who did people vote for, we skip over a lot of the process that got them there. And that's the thing about civics. The most important conversations don't always happen in the textbook. They happen when we ask questions, challenge assumptions, and try to understand why this system works the way it does. Those are the conversations that happen beyond the textbook, and those are the conversations that make civics worth teaching. Remember, civics is something you keep learning, not something you finish. There's always another rule, institution, or piece of history to understand. Thanks for listening to the Fine Print of Democracy.