Parties Fear an Election Sans Voters

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — From the basement of a Machinists Union lodge just south of downtown, Ray Crider is marshaling his troops for the last battle in campaign ’98.

With just one week left until election day, candidates around the country increasingly are shifting their attention from courting the broad mass of potential voters to motivating turnout by narrow slivers of committed partisans.

That’s where Crider, the state director for the AFL-CIO’s campaign effort, comes in. Surrounded by computer-generated lists of names and stacks of fliers making the case for Democratic candidates, Crider and a staff of more than two dozen full-time organizers are trying to prod, exhort and nudge the state’s 180,000 union members to vote in a year when it’s likely that fewer than 4 in 10 eligible Americans will do so.

Paradoxically, it’s that prospect of low overall turnout that is generating much of the urgency this month for get-out-the-vote campaigns from groups such as the AFL-CIO and the Christian Coalition, as well as the political parties and campaigns themselves. With the total number of voters expected to be low, relatively small changes in who votes could have a large effect on who wins.

Clinton Scandal’s Role Diminishing

This summer, it appeared that anger over President Clinton’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky might provide the Republicans with a decisive turnout advantage. But analysts in both parties now believe that tail wind has largely dissipated--and both sides are now clawing for every vote in a year when broad national themes may matter less than the block-by-block struggle to identify and activate the most committed partisans.

“It’s an off-year election; it’s all about getting out the vote,” says Aaron Horner, the field director for Democrat Chris Gorman, who’s running an uphill race against Republican Rep. Anne M. Northup in the Louisville area.

Even with campaigns and interest groups devoting millions of dollars to turnout efforts, the trend line in voter participation is likely to continue pointing down next week. Since 1974, the only time as many as 40% of eligible voters turned out in a non-presidential election was the recession year of 1982, according to the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

No one expects this year to break the trend. “It’s very flat out there,” says Steve Rosenthal, national political director for the AFL-CIO. “Right now, if you say to people what is this election about, they say: ‘I don’t know.’ ”

An ordinary midterm election would provide a modest turnout advantage for Republicans, since the fall-off in voting from presidential years is generally smallest among upper-income voters, who tilt more toward the GOP. Also, many conservative activists believe that anger at Clinton among religious conservatives will significantly widen that gap next week. “Our folks are going to turn out in record numbers,” predicts Randy Tate, executive director of the Christian Coalition.

That possibility still could cause problems for Democrats in parts of the South and Midwest. But at the moment, most political professionals, including many Republicans, do not see signs of an across-the-board turnout advantage for the GOP. Indeed, recent surveys showed Democratic interest rising as the House moved to commence the impeachment process.

But the bottom line is that most campaigns now do not expect the controversy to be a major motivating factor for voters on either side. Randy Kammerdiener, the executive director of the Kentucky Republican Party, echoes the general consensus when he concludes: “The scandal will help us some, but I don’t think it’s going to be huge.”

Nothing is more difficult for campaigns, though, than predicting exactly who will vote. And at this time of year, nothing keeps campaign managers awake at night more than the fear that their own supporters will turn out at rates lower than those who will vote for their rivals.

‘Persuadable’ Voters Targeted

In every race, the turnout battle is a two-front war. On one front, candidates are pushing their most committed supporters to the polls. On the other, they are targeting their limited resources toward carefully defined groups of “persuadable” voters: slim segments of the electorate that they believe may tilt in their direction.

In California, for instance, the state Democratic Party is focusing its efforts on first-time Latino voters, as well as women in coastal regions who have a history of splitting their tickets between the parties, says Garry South, campaign manager for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gray Davis.

Here in Kentucky, where the two parties are locked in three competitive House races and a tight Senate struggle between Republican Rep. Jim Bunning and Democratic Rep. Scotty Baesler--the state GOP is making a massive effort to identify registered Democrats with a history of voting for Republicans. Finding those ticket-splitters is essential for the GOP because Democrats hold a nearly 2-1 registration lead in the state, even though Republicans now hold five of Kentucky’s six congressional seats.

“Clearly a Republican can’t win here unless you get a lot of Democrats to vote for you,” says Terry Carmack, the chief of staff for Northup, a freshman Republican who is favored in her reelection race.

Still, the focus in Kentucky on crossover voters remains the exception: With the expectation of low turnout, most campaigns and interest groups are working primarily to motivate their core supporters.

This week, for instance, the Congressional Black Caucus is launching a three-day bus tour intended to get African American voters to the polls. The Christian Coalition is broadcasting get-out-the-vote ads on gospel and Christian radio stations and plans to distribute 45 million voter guides through churches. And after spending millions of dollars on television advertisements on congressional races in 1996, the AFL-CIO has shifted its electoral effort this year toward a get-out-the-vote program that is deploying thousands of union members to talk personally with their co-workers about the campaign.

Back in Kentucky, that translates to Crider and his stacks of fliers and printouts. So far, he says, Kentucky unions have handed out more than 300,000 leaflets, most of them on or around job sites. In Lexington, union activists are walking door to door to distribute campaign materials in precincts with heavy concentrations of union members. And every night, volunteers are calling lists of members who declared themselves undecided in an earlier round of “voter identification” phone calls by the national AFL-CIO.

“We can make a difference in these races,” Crider insists.

‘Tough to Break Through the Smog’

For everyone knocking on doors or dialing strangers on the phone in get-out-the-vote programs, that’s the galvanizing faith. The gnawing fear is that all of these efforts may not overcome a scandal-ridden political climate that has provided many Americans more incentive to change the channel than to charge the voting booths.

“It’s really tough to break through the smog that’s been created by this scandal,” says the AFL-CIO’s Rosenthal. “Our fear is that we can drive up all the vans that we can, but people won’t get in them.”

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Motivating Voters

Some techniques and occurrences this year that could increase voter turnout:

* Machine-placed “robo calls” ring up New Mexico Democrats and give them a recorded message from Hillary Rodham Clinton. Republicans want Democrats to stay home election day, she says, “but we can’t let them get away with it.”

* Alabama Republicans pass out voter registration forms in churches. Going pew by pew, they sign up thousands of new GOP voters.

* Black ministers in Ohio urge churchgoers to “adopt a household.” Their calling: find a nonvoting family, urge them to vote and offer a ride to the polls.

* Vice President Al Gore records nearly 30 radio spots, a third of them in Spanish, telling people to vote.

* Latino voters in the district of Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) receive pamphlets with a picture of Mexico’s patron saint. The caption reads: “Loretta Sanchez is a baby killer.”

* Applications for absentee ballots in California hit mailboxes Aug. 18, the day after President Clinton confessed to an improper relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky. GOP operatives believe a record number of GOP votes by absentee ballot will result.

Source: Associated Press