The Other Campaign: Who Gets to Vote?

As unions gear up for the election of 2012, they should take a lesson from the electoral contests of 2008 and 2010. These elections were won by strategic moves to reshape the electorate as much as, or more than, by the usual approaches to campaigning. At the highest levels of the political parties, the focus continues to be not only on persuading voters, but on who gets to vote.

The remarkable 2008 triumph of Barack Obama was the result of a surge into the electorate of youth, people of color, and the poor, many of them voting for the first time. In fact, first-time voters may have determined the outcome. Exit polls found that approximately ten million new voters (68.7 percent of all new voters) cast their ballots for Obama, quite possibly exceeding his margin of victory over John McCain by as many as one million votes.¹

Turnout among new voters in 2008 reflected the work of non-partisan organizations to increase voter registration among low-income, people-of-color, and youth constituencies,² as well as the targeting and mobilization efforts of the Obama campaign.³ As a result, the percentage of people-of-color and low-income groups voting for the first time expanded. In 2004, 17 percent of all black voters told survey researchers they were voting for the first time; in 2008, that number was 19 percent. This represents an estimated increase of about six hundred thousand more first-time black voters in 2008 compared to 2004, or about 40 percent of the increase in the overall number of first-time voters. Even more impressive, among Latinos, some 28 percent voted for the first time in 2008, compared to 22 percent who said they were voting for the first time four years earlier.⁴

But the most significant (and encouraging) change in the “first-time” voter group occurred along class lines. First-time voters among the lowest income group, those with annual family income of $15,000 a year or less,⁵ nearly doubled their proportion among all voters in this income category, from 18 percent in 2004 to 34 percent in 2008. Among the least educated group, those with a high school diploma or less, first-time voters also increased their relative share, from 18 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2008, with most of the expansion occurring among those lacking a high school diploma. No other income or education groups among first-time voters showed these rates of change in their patterns of electoral participation.

The story of the constituencies that turned out to vote in such unusually large numbers in 2008 (and what they expect from government) was mostly missed in the popular discussion of that historic election. It was not missed, however, by Obama’s opponents in the Republican Party. Big victories in statewide elections in 2010 gave the GOP new opportunities for changing electoral rules in ways that burden the most vulnerable of voters who, the GOP surmises, won’t vote for them.

The parties have long competed by manipulating electoral rules. Since 2000, with the two major parties so evenly matched at the national level, the GOP has waged a coordinated fight at the state level for political supremacy by voter suppression. The Tea Party victories of 2010, which consolidated the GOP’s unified control of government in twenty states (twenty-one now if we include Virginia in 2011), have resulted in an onslaught of legislation making it harder to register or to vote. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and the National Conference of State Legislatures, in 2011 at least thirty-four states introduced legislation mandating that voters show photo identification to vote, with seven states passing these laws. At the time, only two states already had such laws on the books. Alabama, Kansas, and Tennessee joined Arizona and Georgia to pass laws requiring proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate, to register to vote. At least thirteen states introduced legislation attacking rules designed to facilitate...