[lbo-talk] Okay so maybe camping out in the Zocalo isn't such a great idea...

Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
Sat Sep 16 08:17:26 PDT 2006


http://www.google.com/search?q=non-voters+teixeira http://www.columbiapoliticalreview.com/issues/3/1/wheres_party.html ...there is a hope among many liberals, especially those in Howard Dean's camp, that energizing the base will draw out voters who have not participated in previous elections. Many political observers, however, are skeptical about that theory. "I always feel that relying on non-voters to turn out and vote your way is probably not a good idea because non-voters by and large don't differ as much from people who actually show up and vote as people think," said Ruy Teixiera, a scholar at the Century Foundation and a co-author of the book The Emerging Democratic Majority. "So the concept that they can all be herded into your candidate's camp is usually not true."

http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/000236.php
>...
Problem #3: This almost never works. The idea you can make up serious losses among existing voters by turning out lots of nonvoters is a very dangerous game indeed. Nonvoters rarely differ enough from voters of similar characteristics to warrant such an approach. (For those who want the long course on why this is so, DR recommends, in all due modesty, The Disappearing American Voter) Instead, stick to the tried and true: get out your base (the folks you know will vote for you); fight like hell for the swing voters; and hope that an exciting campaign will bring in some new voters that will lean your way. But to vest your hopes in new voters is a serious—albeit common—mistake.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0815783035/qid=1058907867/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/102-4528937-5565754?v=glance&s=books The Disappearing American Voter (Paperback) by Ruy A. Teixeira

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:63v0YJTFd6wJ:www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/05/30/who_votes_and_who_cares%3Fmode%3DPF+non-voters+teixeira
>...At the same time, Motor Voter's legacy might give pause.
Apparently, motor voters don't necessarily trend Democratic so much as apathetic. Since the law's passage, registration is up, but voting isn't -- and the Census Bureau found that, strangely enough, fewer people said they were registered in 1996, three years after Motor Voter went into effect, than in 1992, the year before. As Wattenberg writes in his book "Where Have All the Voters Gone?" (2002), "The Motor Voter procedures apparently made registering so easy that many forgot that their names were on the voting ledgers."

More strikingly, a significant body of research suggests that, even if nonvoters somehow found themselves in a voting booth, they would act a lot like today's voters. As Ruy Teixeira, author of "Why Americans Don't Vote" (1987) and "The Disappearing American Voter" (1992), puts it, "It generally seems to be true that the level of voting doesn't make a huge difference in the outcome." Teixeira and others argue that the National Election Studies (NES), a series of polls conducted in every presidential campaign since 1952, as well as other survey data, simply don't show a significant difference between the political preferences of voters and nonvoters.

According to UC-Berkeley political scientist Raymond Wolfinger, who has also studied the NES results, we only assume otherwise because we don't pay attention to the relative size of the different groups in the so-called "party of nonvoters." It's not, in fact, the poor or minorities who make up its bulk. The most decisive factors in whether or not one votes, Wolfinger says, are age, education level, and how long one has lived in the same place."

Once you take those three things into account -- and they don't add up to a politically distinctive group -- other things don't make much difference," he says. If nonvoters did have an impact, Wolfinger adds, it would be to occasionally favor third-party candidates like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. (In 1968, he points out, the segregationist candidate George Wallace was preferred by twice as many nonvoters as voters.)



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