World View: Voter turnout key to deciding US presidential race

Voter turnout is a vital feature of mass politics in modern developed societies. The overall trend has been downwards in recent decades, reflecting popular disillusionment with reduced democratic access and voice.

However, the Scottish referendum and the Brexit vote bucked the trend in the United Kingdom, with turnouts of 85 and 72 per cent respectively compared to 66 per cent in the 2015 general election.

The US presidential contest is centrally concerned with turning out the different racial, ethnic, class, gender and age groups supporting Clinton and Trump. The growing importance of populist parties discursively pitting pure homogenous people against corrupt elites throughout Europe poses the question of how their campaigns will affect voter turnouts in future.

The late political scientist Peter Mair linked declining turnouts with a general trend towards hollowing out western democracy. While slight declines in European turnouts in the 1980s and 1990s might reflect contingent factors, he argued strongly that those in the 2000s were part of a wider trend of citizen disengagement with conventional politics.

More electoral volatility, diminished party loyalties and smaller memberships along with greater professionalisation created a tension between the representational function of political parties and their role as responsible governing agents.

Recent research in this tradition led by Hanspeter Kriesi links these trends to the growth of populism in Europe in the shadow of globalisation, the 2008 financial crisis, the resulting recession and converging neoliberal policies in the EU privileging markets over welfare. They show an uneven picture between southern, central and eastern, northern and western Europe, but with a definite relationship between populism and higher mobilised turnout in certain regions and circumstances.

Right-wing parties

That includes Eurosceptic right-wing populist parties such as Ukip in the UK and the National Front in

France

. They cash in on white working-class losers of globalisation, but their core support is from middle- and lower middle-class groups who fear and resent change and link restored national sovereignty to greater democratic voice.

They can drive voter turnout up, but research shows they can also antagonise opponents from voting or drive them to mobilise in response. There is no trans-European pattern here as yet.

The UK is an outlier, as in other spheres. Differential turnout was a key factor in the 2014 Scottish and 2016 EU referendums. In Scotland, the huge vote saw many poorer communities in and around Glasgow doubling their normal participation in favour of independence, joining a surge orchestrated by the Scottish National Party. This was insufficient to beat the counter-mobilisation by those who wanted to remain in the UK and who turned out in even higher numbers than usual.

This summer’s EU referendum was also a battle of competitive turnouts. It pitched the city-regions, college-educated, younger voters and most devolved nations who favoured remaining in the EU against the two-thirds of the working class, older provincial middle class and 60 per cent of the northern, midlands and Welsh voters who favoured leaving. The Leave side turned out much more strongly than the Remain one to secure their victory.

Two-party structure

The recent UK experience is instructive for understanding who might win the US presidential election. There too the contest hinges crucially on which side can turn out their supporters more effectively.

Research by the US census bureau and Pew shows how diverse and increasingly disunited the country is between different social, racial, ethnic and geographical groups.

The two-party structure delivers secure majorities to Republicans or Democrats irrespective of turnout in all but 11 or 12 states out of the 51. But in these it matters hugely who votes this time. In 2012 more than two million non-college educated, white working-class citizens, many in these states, did not vote.

Were they to support Trump this time, notably in Florida, they could tip the balance. The Clinton campaign worries that the blacks, Asians and Hispanics who turned out more intensively for Obama in 2012 there are not so inclined to do so this time.

Republican voters are whiter, older and less educated than Democrats, whose profile has changed more radically since the 1990s. Trump’s strategy is to mobilise key sectors of that Republican electorate more effectively than before.

According to one estimate it would take only a turnout surge among whites without a college degree, from 55 per cent to 66 per cent and a rise in the Republicans' share of their vote from 62 per cent to 67 per cent to allow Trump win the Electoral College even if Clinton won the popular vote.

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