Opinion: Cruz seeks to reconfigure electorate

If America’s 58th presidential election validates Ted Cruz’s audacious “base plus” strategy, he will have refuted assumptions about the importance of independent “swing” voters and the inertia of many missing voters. Critics say his plan for pursuing the Republican nomination precludes winning the presidency. Jason Johnson, Cruz’s chief strategist, responds: “I’m working backward from Election Day,” because Cruz’s plan for winning the necessary 1,236 convention delegates is an extrapolation from his strategy for winning 270 electoral votes.

All presidential campaigns aspire to favorably change the composition of the electorate. Cruz aims to substantially reconfigure the electorate as it has recently been.

Between George W. Bush’s 2000 election and his 2004 re-election, the turnout of non-Hispanic whites increased by an astonishing 10 million. Barack Obama produced a surge of what Johnson calls “two-election voters.” In 2008, the African-American voting rate increased from 2004 while white voting declined slightly; in 2012, African-Americans voted at a higher rate than whites.

In Florida in 2012, turnout of non-Hispanic whites declined from 2008 even though the eligible voting-age population increased 864,000. Nationally, the Census Bureau’s Thom File writes: “The number of non-Hispanic white voters decreased by about 2 million between 2008 and 2012.” In the last five elections (1996-2012), their share of eligible voters declined from 79.2 percent to 71.1 percent and their share of the turnout declined from 82.5 percent to 73.7 percent, while the Hispanic and black shares of votes cast increased about four and three percentage points, respectively.

Nonvoting whites, especially those without college experience, are among Cruz’s principal targets. His geniality toward Donald Trump reflects the Cruz campaign’s estimate that perhaps one-third of the Trumpkins have not voted in recent elections. If so, Trump is doing downfield blocking for Cruz, beginning the expansion of the 2016 electorate by energizing people....

Massive immigration has so altered the electoral college map that it is impossible to conceive of a Republican winning forty-nine states as did Ronald Reagan. We are reduced to contesting in a limited number of states, the loss of any one of which could be fatal.

So the question is not whether on a national basis this alleged policy of Ted Cruz can succeed but whether it can succeed in those few states in which conservatives have a chance and which will determine the election.

Nathan Bedford's first maximum of American politics applies once more (as he once again tediously repeats):

All politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.

This does not mean that such voters cannot be encouraged to register - for example in some states “backlash” against such efforts has apparently increased black participation.

But it does produce additional burdens for Republican candidates attempting attract such voters, for example you have to “front-load” such attempts with efforts to not only attract such voters, but to make sure they are registered, a process that most often be completed well before the election, when such voters are less motivated to pay attention to “politics”.

One concern with this strategy is that voter integrity laws intended to reduce participation by making registration less convenient for lower-income black voters have also been shown to also reduce registration by lower-income, lower-attention white voters.

Liberal BS from top to bottom. Nobody is discouraging anyone from voting even though many should be discouraged from voting. Illegal aliens are voting in sizable numbers and low info voters should be discouraged from voting regardless of their race.

When I renewed my driver's license last month I was asked if I still voted at the same precinct or if I needed to re-register. (We're now split between 2 precincts) In my opinion it should be much harder to vote and we should be required to re-register (in person) every 2 to 4 years.

There is nothing mysterious about how this works: make registration less convenient (for example, fewer days available for registration, less registration available at times other than ordinary workday hours, fewer opportunities to obtain the necessary documentation) and fewer people register.

And the greater the inconvenience of registration, the greater the disproportion in the number of lower-income / lower-attention voters who registe;. if you are working two job: trying to juggle childcare, commuting time and other responsibilities, you are less likely to register to vote, and less likely to vote if registered.

This is political strategy 101, it’s well understood by professional political operatives and professional politicians alike, and if someone doubts it it’s true, they are just not paying attention, or want very badly not to pay attention to the things they are observing.

For the most part public discussion of the effects of increasing the difficulty of registration have centered on black voters, because the politicians and organizations that depend on black voters make a public stink about it.

However, political operatives, academic researchers and others with an interest in the effects of increasing the difficulty of voter registration have noted that such efforts have the effect of depressing the political participation of all lower-income/ lower attention voters irrespective of race. Aand this is something you have to factor into designing a strategy like the one described in this article: voter registration has to be an integral part of your strategy, and the extent registration has been made more difficult, the difficulty of your strategy increases.

And that’s true irrespective of whether you are talking about voters more likely to vote Democrat or Republican.

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I know it’s an article of faith here that there’s widespread voter fraud in presidential elections.

There is almost no objective evidence that this is true, and there’s a lot of evidence that it’s not: for example, if it was the case that widespread voter fraud was skewing election results in presidential elections, we would expect that there would be a substantial difference between the results predicted by aggregate polling and the final result.
In fact, in the last few presidential elections (the first for which such techniques were effectively applied) aggregate polling is an extremely accurate prediction of the final outcome, and if you want to believe that the system is somehow being manipulated to produce this result, then you have to believe in a widespread conspiracy encompassing not only Democrat but Republican leaning polling organizations.
In the abstract, it doesn’t matter if large numbers of people believe that electoral results they don’t like are the result of nonexistent fraud.

As a practical matter - and I’ve argued this here for years - it makes a very important difference.

If you believe that the election is stolen, rather than that you are doing a poor job of presenting your philosophy and program to the voters, then you don’t improve your method of presenting your philosophy and program, which means you keep getting results you don’t like.

I applaud your candor regarding further restricting the franchise to those willing to make the effort to re-register every few years: it’s lot easier to analyze the effects of policy changes when their proponents are straightforward about their intended effects.

In this case one of the effects (intended or otherwise) of such a policy would be to make it more difficulty for an “insurgent” candidate such as Cruz to win the presidency if he or she needs to motivate “alienated” voters, as these would be the least likely to have taken the trouble to renew their registration prior to the election.

The solution, of course, would be to mount a longer-term effort to identify and register (and re-register) voters attracted to “insurgent” candidates well in advance of the current election cycle.

That, however, is the job of - and as a practical matter requires - a “political establishment”, either in the form of a political party, or of NGOs which will have their own agendas.

Such efforts can be very effective, for example the successful effort to elect state legislators who enacted redistricting favorable to conservative candidates, which helped create the safe Republican districts from which many current “insurgent” members of the Freedom Caucus were elected.

In fact, effect is so powerful that it’s a major reason that a nationally majority Democrat party outvotes the Republicans at the national level, but Republicans nevertheless hold a historically outlier majority of house seats.

However, the sorts of “establishments” which support efforts usually represent constituencies which expect governmental advantage in return (the discharge partition for the EX-IM is a current example) - and “insurgent” movements are NOT what they have in mind in return for their organizational efforts and financial support.

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