The Voter Turnout Will Swing Election

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 30, 2000 | by Timothy W. Maier

With the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore a dead heat, pundits predict that the winner will be the candidate who can draw the largest turnout among his party's base.

Prepare for a dogfight. The presidential race is so close that some pollsters are predicting the margin of victory could be as narrow as John F. Kennedy's 1 percent win over Richard Nixon in 1960. Whether Vice President Al Gore or Texas Gov. George W. Bush becomes the next president will rest on getting out the vote of loyalists in key states.

Up for grabs at this point appear to be Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri and Kentucky. For Bush to win, political analysts believe he must take Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. A loss in California could destroy Gore, with Green Party Candidate Ralph Nader taking environmental votes away from the vice president. Bush is doing very well among Hispanics in the Golden State.

"You'll see Bush put in a lot of effort in California to force Gore to spend a lot of time in the state," says Rick Hardy, a political-science professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. California should be a solid lock for Gore and right now it's not. If Gore does not take California, the ball game is over."

Key to California and the other so-called battleground states is the ability of each party to get its base voters to the polls. But those bases have been changing. Democrats, who at one time held a 2-to-1 national advantage over Republicans in registration, have lost that partisan edge, as was evident in the South when Democratic turnout in 1998 was only 10.3 percent. Alarmed lest this trend spread, a Democratic campaign to get out the vote is in full stride. Leading that effort are a host of special-interest groups, such as Handgun Control, Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club, which are spending millions of dollars to elect Gore. Similarly, the AFL-CIO, a hefty supporter of Gore, is spending $1 million per week on TV advertising -- in addition to the $43 million the union dumped directly into Democratic coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In Wisconsin, the Voter Empowerment Project of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill is working to get as many mentally ill people as possible to the polls to vote Democratic. Democrats are addressing groups such as the Grand Avenue Club, an educational, vocational and recreational organization for adults with mental disabilities, to encourage them to vote. Although 44 states, including Wisconsin, prohibit some people with mental illness from voting, Wisconsin and most others do not automatically ban them. A mental patient or client has to have been ruled incompetent to vote by a judge to be barred from casting a ballot.

Not to be outdone, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Democratic former congressman Kwiesi Mfume, has been busy trying to tap votes from areas that long have been ignored -- the latest initiative involving absentee ballots for prisoners convicted of misdemeanors or awaiting trial in all 100 counties in North Carolina. The NAACP plan is part of a larger effort to register black voters through civic organizations, churches, college campuses and retirement homes throughout the nation. The pro-Democratic group set a goal of 4 million new voters, 500,000 alone in North Carolina.

Another voter initiative likely to send more Democrats to the polls is that of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which has announced it will spend $5 million to get out the pro-Democratic vote in the aftermath of the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the RU-486 abortion pill. Similarly, the leftwing American Association of University Women (AAUW) has announced it will "educate and mobilize women voters." It has 150,000 members in 1,500 local branches and says it plans to use its network to distribute voter guides in more than 140 congressional districts, focusing essentially on Democratic initiatives in education, health care, civil rights, workplace equity and reproductive choice.

For Republicans, the Christian Coalition of America, which long has helped deliver votes for Republicans, has been sniping at Bush for failing directly to attack Gore and his agenda. The group's founder, Pat Robertson, was particularly upset with Bush for turning down an invitation to speak before the organization's convention. Instead, Bush sent a video message and vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney's wife, Lynn, to address the group, which long has run get-out-the-vote campaigns among conservative Christians. Robertson called Bush's failure to attend the coalition kickoff "very risky," telling reporters: "If you want the troops to go out and fall on their swords for you, it doesn't hurt for the general to stand up and say, `I need your help.'"

Robertson says he fears that Gore's running mate, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., could take away some of Bush's support among religious Americans, adding: "With Lieberman, there's going to be some defection on moral issues."