The coming election will, in no small part, be decided by who decides not to vote. Hot Air explains:

Good thing neither of the two parties is depending very heavily on young adults to replicate their high turnout in 2008 and 2012, eh?

Democrats must be wondering what it’s going to take. Bernie Sanders is on the trail, Clinton is doing dopey “Funny or Die” segments, Katy Perry even took her top off. How can these darned millennials be convinced that their corrupt, charmless, dishonest nominee is worth turning out for?

That is… quite a trend. The glass-half-empty view for Clinton is that the great question of the election, whether she can reassemble Obama’s coalition, is being answered and that answer ain’t good. Young adults won’t turn out. She’ll have to hope there are enough college-educated white women at the polls to balance Trump’s gigantic margins among the white working class. The glass-half-full view is that she’s already [slightly] ahead in the polls nationally with plenty of room still to grow among the young before November. And not all of the decline in enthusiasm among millennials is necessarily attributable to her. Romney won 37% of the 18-29 vote in 2012 but Trump routinely polls terribly among that group, to the point that he trails [Libertarian] Gary Johnson in some surveys. It may be that Republican millennials are deserting Trump at rates similar to or greater than Democratic millennials deserting Hillary, which would blunt the effect of the downturn in turnout on her overall numbers.

Current polling shows about 7% of voters supporting the Libertarian and 2% the Green candidate. That’s a fair piece of the electorate but history tells us the third/fourth party vote will likely shrink somewhat by election day. In terms of major candidate advantage from this, it probably helps Mr Trump most, albeit only to a small degree.

Far more important will be the number and demographic breakdown of deliberate non-voters. Millennials are key here, although they aren’t the only demographic wherein turnout is uncertain. Most within the young adult slice would normally be Democrat voters (this reflecting their thorough indoctrination by the clerisy) but not-voting will also be a phenomenon among college-educated Republican women. Sadly, they take the Donald too literally.

Back to Hot Air:

One other thing. The number of voters aged 18-34 who said they would definitely vote was also down sharply at this point in 2012 from the heights of 2008, throwing a scare into Obama that even he couldn’t reassemble the “Obama coalition.” In the end, though, they showed up for him. According to the exit polls, the 18-29 group four years ago was actually a slightly larger share of the electorate (19%) than it was in 2008 (18%). Either they were more prepared to vote in 2012 than they let on when Gallup asked them that fall or they rallied in the final weeks of the election.

The last-minute surge in Millennial Obama voters in 2012 can be attributed almost entirely to the role of colleges in herding their students to the polls, which were typically located on campus. That, and peer pressure. The former will probably be repeated in 2016. I’m not sure the latter will be so powerful this time.

Still, any downturn in young adults’ enthusiasm to vote is good news on balance for Trump. What’s not good news for Trump is this new analysis of voter registration by Dave Wasserman… The potential for a Trump surge this fall lies in the fact that there are enormous numbers of white voters who didn’t vote in the last election… How enormous a number are we talking about? Try 55 million, more than 10 times Obama’s national margin of victory over Romney in 2012. By Wasserman’s best estimate, 47 million of those white nonvoters have no college degree, making them prime candidates to support Trump. The number of potential Trump voters out there (whites without degrees who didn’t vote last time) is so vast that Trump would only need to turn out small percentages of them in key states to swing the entire election – 2.9% in Florida, 7.5% in Ohio, 11.8% in Pennsylvania. The problem is that most of the nonvoter pool, 40 out of 55 million, isn’t registered to vote at all. And as best as Wasserman can tell, there are no signs yet that they’re starting to register this fall in order to vote for Trump.

…[This is] not a disaster for Trump that they aren’t since there are still 15 million or so whites – three times Obama’s 2012 margin of victory – who are registered to vote even though they chose not to cast a ballot last time.

A sharply improved turnout in 2016 compared to 2012 by non-college white voters is absolutely needed for a Trump win. I don’t know if he’ll get what he requires. However I would note the RNC has been reporting excellent results from their state-level voter registration drives. The data below is two weeks old. Still, it’s instructive:

Note the drop in Democrat registration in Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Does this reflect party-switchers? For sure it suggests lack of enthusiasm for Mrs. Clinton.

…Trump’s appeal to working-class whites is stronger than any Republican’s since Reagan but his lack of a sophisticated turnout operation might end up with him leaving lots of potential votes on the table, easily enough to mean the difference between victory and defeat…

Ohio is traditionally the swing state. Trump is ahead there. Breitbart News has more:

Now that Trump is winning the “must-win,” the New York Times has revised its view of Ohio’s importance: “After decades as one of America’s most reliable political bellwethers, an inevitable presidential battleground that closely mirrored the mood and makeup of the country, Ohio is suddenly fading in importance this year,” writes Jonathan Martin, who notes that Clinton has basically conceded the state.

Apparently the Clinton campaign’s central problem with Ohio is that they’re losing badly with white voters. Sometimes bellwether states really are bellwethers.

Then there’s the black vote. The Clinton minions are very worried about reduced black turnout this year, especially in Florida. Hillary’s problem there is exacerbated by an issue that Haitians have with her and Bill – to whit, that they took charge of the post-earthquake reconstruction effort in Haiti then funneled the money to corporate cronies while doing essentially nothing for the Haitian people, many of whose relatives are now registered Florida voters.

Given the above, the the obvious strategy for both candidates is to drive up their opponent’s negatives in the hope of getting large numbers of traditional Republican or Democrat voters to stay home on election day (or not cast a vote at the top of the ticket). Both sides are at this. A related and perhaps more important issue will be which candidate sustains the most self-inflicted damage over the next five weeks. And then of course there will be “events, my dear boy, events,” since each piece of new news has the potential to shine an unflattering light on either Donald or Hillary.

Me, I don’t think it’s ethical to abstain. I believe we’re obliged as citizens to choose the lesser of two weevils.

Don’t know the old joke? Well, here it is, circa 1809. The setting is the wardroom of HMS Surprise, where the Captain is dining – and drinking, heavily – with his officers as the ship labors its way into the South Pacific Ocean from Antarctic waters. From ‘Master and Commander:’

Dinner in the officers’ mess. The captain is inebriated but asks, apparently seriously:

Captain Jack Aubrey: “Do you see those two weevils doctor?” [they are crawling in some ancient hard bread there on the table]

Dr Stephen Maturin: “I do.”

Aubrey: “Which would you choose?”

Maturin: [sighs, annoyed] “Neither; there is not a scrap a difference between them. They are the same species of Curculio.”

Aubrey: “If you had to choose. If you were forced to make a choice. If there was no other response…”

Maturin: [Exasperated] “Well then, if you are going to push me… [the doctor studies the weevils briefly] I would choose the right hand weevil; it has… significant advantage in both length and breadth.”

[the Captain thumps his fist in the table]

Aubrey: “There, I have you! You’re completely dished! Do you not know that in the service… [pauses] one must always choose the lesser of two weevils?”

The officers burst out in laughter.

– Tacitus

Copyright 2016 Tacitus
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