Not just for voter turnout. Higher poll numbers are important for raising $$. People (especially those with large bank balances) want to back a winner.
Voter turnout is much higher than 1% on the November elections. Sure, reducing the effort of any given vote would help turnout; but also aligning this election with the general election would likely help (it also helps with the cost of elections).
Turnout for presidential elections has been increasing in the US in the last decades. Also 70 percent is great turnout when compared with other countries.
There seems to be an assumption that low voter turnout is driven by something other than the poor quality of the candidates offered and a rational assessment of the value of voter time versus the marginal value of a single vote.
It's not obvious to me that higher voter turnout leads to better governance.
How about try to increase voter turnout first?
No amount of public education and politician tracking will be useful if only 1/3 of eligible voters actually vote.
Amusingly, upthread you and I are talking about whether encouraging more people to vote leads to better outcomes, and this is an example where the answer is yes: a candidate can be both an extremist and receive 50% of the vote if, as in is true in the US, less than half the eligible electorate actually votes. The current president was elected on the backs of 25% of eligible voters; does that make him an extremist candidate even by the standards of the US electorate? If we had more data on account of more Americans asserting their preferences, then we could actually determine that.
>> Is there actually evidence that higher poll numbers in favor of X lead to higher voter turnout from supporters of X? It seems like everyone takes that for granted but I've never seen any evidence that it's true.
I'd like to see some raw evidence, too.
But since we're forced to speculate at the moment, my bet would be that the relation to voter turnout and a candidate's chances of winning isn't linear. It's probably more of a parabola: the more extreme a candidate's chances of being elected (or being defeated), the less likely anyone is to come out and vote, because it feels impossible to make a difference. On the flip side, I'd suspect that the closer and more contested a race is, the more likely people are to feel obligated to vote.
Solving the problem "low turnout" requires getting people to vote. When people who don't vote are turned out, they tend to vote D. Strengthening the democratic process and increasing turnout for Democrats are currently the same thing.
The problem is then what do you do with low voter turnout? The article says that this election has in previous years resulted in <1% of eligible voters. That is clearly untenable.
Because when people are forced to vote, they are on average more likely to vote for a random name they heard on TV than for a candidate with a program they read and the background they studied.
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