How Do You Get to Capitol Hill? Turnout, Turnout, Turnout!

By now you know my caveat: that the only way that Coakley wins this race is if the polling turnout models are wrong.  So I want to spend some time discussing turnout.  Conventional wisdom has been saying for sometime that lower turnout helps Brown, while a higher turnout favors Coakley.   Of course, conventional wisdom also said Coakley was going to waltz to victory (and yes, even a week ago I shared that belief.) So, take it with the requisite grain of salt when I say that I no longer believe higher turnout necessarily favors Coakley.

The reason that higher turnout is supposed to favor Coakley is because registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1.  So, by dint of sheer numbers more voters must benefit Coakley.   We tend to forget, however, that Republicans have overcome this numbers deficit to win statewide office on more than one occasion, most frequently in the gubernatorial race.  How do Republicans win in this heavily Democratic state?  There is no single path to victory.  William Weld won by holding onto Republicans, fiscal conservatives but also winning over social libertarians in some of the more affluent communities. Paul Cellucci, his successor, drew more heavily from working class Democrats.  Mitt Romney benefitted by running against the specter of Democratic corruption in the State House.  This is where we begin to see the brilliance of Brown’s campaign:  he has positioned himself as a fiscal conservative who will cut taxes and hold down government spending, but has managed at the same time to distance himself from accusations that he is part of the social conservative wing of the Republican Party.  Moreover, he has portrayed Coakley as part of the Democratic establishment whose leaders, in a series of high profile cases, have been linked to corruption.  Meanwhile, he casts himself as a truck-driving middle class guy.  In short, Brown has taken a page out of each of the recent successful statewide runs by Republicans.

What this suggests to me is that broad gauge measures of turnout aren’t going to be particularly helpful in forecasting victory.  Instead, we want to know the variation in turnout by area.  In addition to bringing out Republicans, Brown’s victory hinges on his ability to draw conservative Catholic Democrats in areas like Springfield and Worcester as well as fiscally conservative independent suburbanites on the North Shore and the Metrowest corridor just west of Boston.  Coakley, meanwhile, needs a huge turnout from liberal affluent bedroom communities around Boston and in the liberal enclaves in western Mass as well as the Democratic base in Boston.

I’ll be on throughout the day to discuss what I’m hearing about turnout, but here’s the lay of the land. There are about 4.2 million registered voters in Massachusetts. As noted above, Democrats outnumber Republicans; among registered voters; 37 percent, or about 1.5 million, are Democrats versus 12 percent registered Republicans, or 490,000.  In the recent completed Democratic primary won by Coakley, less than half of registered Democrats – about 668,000 – turned out to vote.  In the Republican primary, turnout was even lower, with about 165,000 – about a third – of registered Republicans turning out.

How many will turnout today?  I’m guessing the closest approximation is a midterm election.  In 2006 – an admittedly high interest election – about 2.2 million vote were cast. Let’s assume, then, that this special election will attract at least 2 million voters, or about 48% turnout.  So for Brown to win this, he probably needs somewhere above 1 million votes. It’s been done before. When Mitt Romney won the 2002 gubernatorial race, he pulled in just over a million votes. Where does Brown get these votes?  Let’s assume his Republican base is very energized, and he gets 300,000 votes there (a shade over 60% of registered Republicans).  He needs to pick up 700,000 votes, largely from registered independents I’m guessing.  All told there are about 2.1 million independent voters (about 50% of all registered voters.)  Assuming 50% turnout among independents (I think this is probably on the low end), that means Brown must win a bit more than 6 of 10 independents. (This is all back of the envelope calculations, mind you. All statistics from the Massachusetts’  Secretary of State’s website.)  Can he do this?  A week ago I’d have said no.  But I have never seen anything like the polling surge I have observed this week.  That surge is captured in this truly amazing Pollster.com chart:.

In a matter of days, Coakley’s 15% polling lead turned into a 5% deficit.  This reflects, I think, the truncated nature of the campaign; voters simply began tuning in late, which made early polls misleading.  But it also captures the surge of enthusiasm for Brown’s candidacy as people began to pay attention.  I’ve really never seen anything like it.

That surge, and the evident voter discontent that’s fueling it, makes me think a high turnout race will actually benefit Brown.

We’ll know in a matter of hours.  I’ll be on later with a post explaining why I think this is NOT a referendum on Obama, or on health care.  Note, however, there will be no exit polling done.  So I’m going to have to rely on polling data to make my case.

Addendum (12:29): I’ve added a link to the Massachusetts elections website and gave additional information on independents.