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Another look at the importance of turnout

November 3, 2012 By oceandreams

I know most of us here would like to forget about that 2010 special election. But one more quick peek, if you’ll indulge me, not at the campaigns but at the election results. I took a look at turnout rates by town, and whether there was any correlation between turnout and who won the town, Brown or Coakley. (I know it would have been better to do this by precinct, but I don’t have that data for the entire state).

I uploaded the data to Statwing, a site that does automated statistical analysis. Their conclusion: There was a small but “clearly significant” relationship between turnout and the Democratic margin of victory/loss. “Higher values for 2010 turnout are weakly associated with lower values for 2010 Democratic margin,” they said. (If you’re interested, Statwing says it determined this from a 0.00287 P-value and -0.159 Pearson’s r effect size. Anything greater than 0.1 and less than 0.3 is consider small effect).

My next question: What would the election have looked like if turnout was the same everywhere? So,  I calculated what the results would have been if every community had the same 54% turnout rate (while still keeping the same percentages for Brown and Coakley).

The effect? Standardizing turnout by city/town instead of having higher turnout in GOP-leaning towns would have shaved 2.3 percentage points off of Brown’s margin of 4.9%.

What I wanted to do was calculate results if turnout rates were the same as in the 2008 presidential election, but I couldn’t find that ’08 turnout by town. Best I could do was see what would happen if all communities that went Democratic in the special election had turned out at least at the 58% average of how the Republican ones turned out. That meant increasing turnout for all the Coakley towns that were below 58% to 58%, still keeping the same ratio of Coakley and Brown support.

That made the race a near tie — Coakley would have been within 63K votes of Brown. And that’s with a bad candidate running an awful campaign. And yes, yes, I know, it was precisely the problem of a bad candidate running an awful campaign that created the turnout gap in the first place.

This time, we’ve got a great candidate! …  although also a more formidable opponent with the advantage of incumbency and a puzzling but real image among independents as a bipartisan moderate (despite his actual record). His supporters are pumped up … but this time, so are ours. Now imagine the impact of a superior get-out-the-vote effort for our side.

No, I take that back. Don’t imagine it. Please go out and make it happen. If you haven’t yet, check out the list of local campaign offices, contact one and volunteer for a get out the vote shift today, tomorrow, Monday or Election Day.

And now you’ll have to excuse me, as I’ve got to get ready for my afternoon canvassing shift….

 

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Filed Under: User Tagged With: Elizabeth Warren, ma-senate

Comments

  1. fenway49 says

    November 3, 2012 at 7:42 pm

    and the same Brown-Dem spread. The goal of the campaign is, I think, to increase turnout in Boston, Cambridge, etc. to the same (high, 70% or so) levels it was in Scott Brown strongholds like Wrentham. I also think there’s plenty of room to improve on the 2-1 spread for Brown in many towns that went big for Obama and Kerry (as Pres. candidate in 2004 and Senator in 2008) but in which Martha Coakley did very poorly in 2010.

    Anyway, I was out today and let me say, if the whole state was like my home neighborhood of Newtonville, Scott Brown would never have gotten elected to anything. Newton was 63% turnout in 2010 special, low by our standards, but I think we’ll do much better this time!

    • oceandreams says

      November 3, 2012 at 8:42 pm

      Because I believe they would have shown a Democratic victory, even with the low level of enthusiasm among Coakley voters. There are two parts to this election: increasing total level of support and turning out the vote. I think Elizabeth Warren has done a great job in the first part; I wanted to point out the importance of that second part.

      In 3 hours of canvassing today I talked to one Warren supporter who didn’t know his polling place. Multiply that by every canvass shift that’s going on around the state and that alone made it worth it for me.

      (Although I have to admit I’m looking forward to having a weekend next weekend that does not involve knocking on strangers’ doors.)

  2. margot says

    November 3, 2012 at 11:50 pm

    was a 99 year old gentleman who accepted my offer to arrange a ride to the polls, saying, “that will keep my record untarnished.” He has voted in every election since 1930!

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