Stakes High but Interest Low at Polls

NASHVILLE —  The rhetoric was fiery and the audience enthusiastic at a National Rifle Assn. get-out-the-vote rally here late last week.

But the crowd still filled only about half the ballroom in the Opryland convention center. And there was a distinct note of concern in the message from the podium.

“Some gun owners think they can sit this one out,” said Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute of Legislative Affairs. “That’s what [liberals] ... want you to do.”

This fall, the NRA is hardly alone in worrying that its supporters lack the motivation to vote. Candidates, the national parties and interest groups across the political spectrum are all struggling to drive voters to the polls in a year when few issues have caught fire.

“I don’t remember a more difficult set of conditions for getting people to vote in any election,” said Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

Yet precisely because voter interest is so low this year, the stakes are high for these get-out-the-vote drives. In an election when relatively few Americans are expected to participate, the efforts that move even relatively small numbers of voters could tip dozens of close races.

“This is a year when the ground game matters more than ever,” said Maria Cardona, the Democratic National Committee’s communication director.

Both national parties are putting their money behind that sentiment, investing in expensive efforts to identify their supporters and then move them to the polls. Democrats say they have put unprecedented sums -- about $15 million -- into the coordinated get-out-the-vote campaigns run by state parties.

That effort has ranged from a massive drive to update the state parties’ lists of Democratic voters to the systematic use of former President Clinton to encourage turnout in the minority community. Clinton has campaigned extensively and recorded radio ads and phone call messages aimed at black voters. Last Friday, he conducted a conference call with almost 2,000 African American ministers urging them to turn out the vote.

“In the 2000 [presidential] campaign, we were sitting around the last three weeks debating whether to use Bill Clinton; now we are debating where we can use him because we have so many requests,” says Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s election bid and now is directing the Democrats’ African American turnout effort.

Republicans have revamped their get-out-the-vote efforts this year, spending at least $20 million after the party concluded in an internal review that the “Democrats did a better job of motivating and turning out their voters” in 1998 and 2000.

This year, under the banner of the “72-hour task force,” Republicans have shifted their focus from paid phone banks and mailings toward matching the Democratic success at recruiting volunteers to knock on doors and make calls. In tests the Republican National Committee conducted in 2001, it found communication from volunteers increased turnout much more than calls from professional phone banks.

“When there is so much television advertising going on, and people are getting tons of mail, this one contact -- going door to door, having a volunteer call up on the phone -- really cuts through,” says Blaise Hazelwood, the political director of the RNC, who was knocking on doors in Colorado on Sunday.

Besides the personal touch, Republicans also are banking on President Bush’s nonstop appearances in the campaign’s final weeks to push their partisans to the polls. Bush is on a swing that is taking him to 17 cities in 15 states in the last five days of the campaign.

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Lack of Motivation

All this effort may be critical in tilting the needle toward one party or the other in close races. Yet it appears unlikely to increase the overall level of participation.

In some states with particularly engaging races -- such as the tight Senate contests in South Dakota and New Hampshire -- analysts expect large numbers of voters to turn out.

But overall, most experts are expecting a meager national turnout. Based on national polling released Sunday, Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, projects that about 35% of eligible voters will show up Tuesday.

That would produce a turnout similar to the level in 1998, which was the smallest showing for a midterm election since 1942, according to the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

“People are not compelled to turn out for either party,” Kohut said. “We have all of these big issues, yet they haven’t been translated into any political point of view. People are not angry, and they are not finger-pointing, and that’s what it takes to get people motivated.”

Relatively low turnout probably argues for a relatively low level of change in Congress. The two most recent midterm elections that produced big gains for one party, especially in the House, saw a surge in voting. That was the case in 1982, when Democrats gained 26 House seats amid concern over the economy, and 1994, when a backlash against Clinton’s chaotic first two years swept Republicans to control of the House and Senate.

This year, no one sees such a brush fire developing for either side. Indeed, in strikingly similar language, activists from both ends of the ideological spectrum say that trying to ignite voter interest this fall is like trying to start a fire with wet tinder.

“There is less combustion out there on issues than in any year I’ve seen in quite a while,” says Wayne R. LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president and chief executive.

Two principal problems are confronting the get-out-the-vote efforts on both sides.

One is that the election has been overshadowed by a succession of other stories -- first the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, then the debate over possible war with Iraq, and finally the sniper shootings in the suburbs around Washington.

Even more important, candidates in both parties are blurring distinctions on many issues that organizers have traditionally used to motivate their supporters. Republicans have tried to obscure differences with Democrats on issues such as prescription drugs and Social Security that have been critical to organized labor’s formidable turnout effort. And Democrats, especially in the states that Bush carried in 2000, have moved to the right on cultural issues, particularly guns.

Sitting backstage in the Opryland ballroom here, for instance, LaPierre marveled with equal parts admiration and frustration at a flier Democratic Senate candidate Mark Pryor’s campaign had distributed the night before outside an NRA rally in Arkansas.

At the rally, the NRA had endorsed Pryor’s opponent, incumbent Republican Tim Hutchinson, but the flier showed Pryor surrounded by a group of hunters and describes him as a “strong defender of our right to bear arms.”

“It was easier to motivate people,” LaPierre said with a sigh, “when [Al] Gore was handing out fliers saying all gun owners were going to have to take a national test.”

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Groups Narrow Focus

The AFL-CIO, which has run what many consider the most effective turnout operation of any interest group in recent years, is facing similar problems this fall. Steve Rosenthal, the federation’s political director, says it has switched its turnout message from broad national issues toward more narrow union issues, such as job safety and the minimum wage.

“In an environment where voters are having a hard time differentiating between where the candidates stand [on national issues] ... we can trump some of the big-ticket issues with stuff that is a little closer to home,” he said.

One exception to this pattern is NARAL. It has focused its greatest efforts on Senate races in Colorado and New Hampshire, where Democrats Tom Strickland and Jeanne Shaheen, respectively, have emphasized their support for legalized abortion; their Republican challengers oppose it.

“We have people calling every two minutes for days on end, we have literature drops, we have neighborhood walks set up all weekend long in both of these states,” Michelman said.

One slight edge for Republicans in the turnout struggle may be the nature of the battlefield.

Many of the most competitive Senate races tend to be in rural or Southern states -- such as South Dakota, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas -- where the NRA, the most effective group at turning out voters on the conservative side, has a wider reach than the AFL-CIO, the most important Democratic-leaning group.

But the unmatched overall scale of the AFL-CIO’s effort -- which is built on union members talking personally with other members -- still has Republicans concerned.

“One of the reasons we did the task force and placed so much emphasis on people-to-people contact is the unions,” Hazelwood said. “We have to work harder, and we have to start earlier.”