It's the Turnout, Stupid

It’s easy to give up on John Kerry. After dominating the debates and surging in the polls, Kerry has fallen back behind President Bush in a couple of polls, and the media is sounding the alarm. Every day I hear solid Democrats declaring defeat and preparing for four more years of Bush. Fortunately for the country, reports of John Kerry’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. As the press talks about the fickle will of likely voters, they are missing a bigger story. It’s called the 2004 presidential election, and, unbeknownst to the punditry, it’s now in the hands of a group of kids who don’t remember Vietnam and wouldn’t be trusted to clean the toilets in Kerry’s press office.

First, there are no swing voters. After one of the biggest bloodbaths in the history of presidential debates, John Kerry shot up, maybe, a handful of points, and that bump seems to be fading. Several polls show essentially no change since the debates started. After all, if you’ve been paying attention, you probably have some pretty firm opinions about the guy in the White House.

The polls do show one interesting trend, though. The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, which gives Bush an 8 point lead among likely voters, shows a tied race if you include all registered voters. The message is simple, though it was completely ignored by the USAToday article on the poll. If John Kerry can make sure that registered voters—not to mention newly registered voters, who aren’t polled—get to the polls on election day, he’s in a much better position than the polls show.

I am proud to hail from one of those swing states that the cable news folks get to color-code every time they get a new poll. My home state, New Mexico, was the closest state in the union in 2000. Late on election night, Bush was winning the state by 4 votes when a retired engineer noticed a mathematical error that had lopped 500 votes off Al Gore’s total. When the error was fixed and all the ballots were counted, Gore had won the state by 366 votes. If Gore had claimed one other state—say, Tennessee—he would be President right now, and 366 New Mexicans and a retired engineer would be responsible.

This year, New Mexico could go to either candidate. The latest polls are evenly split. One shows Kerry up three; the other shows Bush up three. But, in one important way, New Mexico is a different state than it was in 2000. This year, New Mexico voters have a whole month to vote. And Democrats are spending millions of dollars to make sure that they do.

America Coming Together (ACT), a nonprofit that helps Democratic candidates, plans to drag voters to the polls for an entire month. Ruben Marinelarena, an ACT organizer who graduated from Harvard last year, is responsible for ensuring that 6,000 Democrats who don’t always vote on election day get their vote counted before November 2. In a state where 366 votes decided the last election, Ruben’s job is no joke. Democrats have every reason to believe that if Ruben succeeds, John Kerry will win New Mexico. Democrats enjoy a 5 to 3 advantage among registered voters in New Mexico. That means Democrats have far more to gain than Republicans from efforts targeted at getting voters to the polls. Only the Democrats can win this election by focusing on voter turnout.

Democrats will also benefit from the efforts of nonpartisan groups focused on registering and turning out minority voters. In New Mexico, a loose association of nonprofits incuding Moving America Forward has registered more than 70,000 new voters, more than enough to shift the political terrain in the Democrats’ favor. This is happening in almost every swing state. The polls show a closely divided country, but these new voters, most of whom are Democrats, are not being polled. All the polls are measuring an electorate that no longer exists. The real electorate is larger and more Democratic than the pundits think.

The importance of voter turnout is good news for young Democrats. We are the ground troops that enable candidates to reach voters where they live. Every employee of the ACT office where Marinelarena works is under 25. Morgan Simon, who is in charge of one-third of Moving America Forward’s ambitious New Mexico voter registration goal, is 21 years old. In every part of the country, young people are the driving force behind massive voter turnout operations.

Candidates and media outlets ignore young people because we don’t vote, we don’t give money and we’re unlikely to be writing television ads. But they are fighting yesterday’s war. The 2004 presidential election will be about who shows up, and no group is doing more to determine which voters will come out on election day than young people. We are knocking the doors; we are organizing the canvasses; and we are speaking to the new voters who will decide the election. While the candidates and the media debate the polls, the 2004 election is being decided on street corners and front stoops in places like New Mexico. While Kerry and the pundits talk, we are doing the fighting. And we are winning.

Samuel M. Simon ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.