The Independent View: The Myth of Swing Voters in Midterm Elections

I found this article on the New York Times, The UpShot page, by Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at U.C.L.A., and a co-author of "The Gamble,” about the 2012 presidential campaign.

She writes:

If you want to understand the 2014 midterm elections, remember this simple fact about American politics: There just aren’t that many swing voters.

Many people change their minds over the course of a campaign about whether to vote and even which candidate they’re leaning toward. Ultimately, though, voters tend to come home to their favored party. There are relatively few voters who cross back and forth between the parties during a campaign or even between elections.

Political professionals have increasingly come to appreciate this pattern and have focused resources on getting previous voters to the polls. Both parties have spent considerable effort in recent elections trying to understand the effects of television ads, canvassing, phone calls and mailings on turnout. Mobilizing a party’s voters has become as important as persuading undecided or swing voters.

The 2010 midterm elections highlight the relatively small number of swing voters. After winning with a wide margin and extraordinary enthusiasm in 2008, the Democrats suffered one of the largest losses of seats in any midterm two years later.

Very Few 2008 Voters Chose a Different Party in 2010

Obama Voters
6% - Switched party
65% - Same party
28% - Stayed home

McCain Voters
6% - Switched party
76% - Same party
17% - Stayed home

But only a small percentage of voters actually switched sides between 2008 and 2010. There were almost as many John McCain voters who voted for a Democratic House candidate in 2010 as there were Obama voters who shifted the other way. That may be a surprise to some, but it comes from one of the largest longitudinal study of voters, YouGov’s Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (C.C.A.P.), for which YouGov interviewed 45,000 people at multiple points during 2011 and 2012.

The results clearly show that voters in 2010 did not abandon the Democrats for the other side, but they did forsake the party in another important way: Many stayed home.

Turnout in midterm elections is always down from presidential elections, and Democrats routinely fight to return more of their voters to the polls than the Republicans.

These stable patterns of American politics reveal a clear path for both parties in 2014: Get your 2012 voters to the polls.

The 2014 fight is not over swing voters. It’s for partisans.

But I think the opportunity is there for independents to make a difference.

The goal should be to take away the major parties majority in the House and the Senate by electing more independent candidates.