When a top Pennsylvania Republican remarked last month that the state’s new voter ID law would help Mitt Romney win Pennsylvania in November, which no Republican presidential candidate has done since 1988, he reignited a debate over whether the law is intended to curb fraud, as Republicans say, or to depress Democratic turnout, as critics charge.
Mike Turzai, the House majority leader in Pennsylvania, made the remark when he spoke to a meeting of the Republican State Committee. He ticked off a number of recent conservative achievements by the Republican-led legislature, including, as Turzai put it, “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, has demonstrated that in 2008, even if Obama had failed to boost turnout among key Democratic groups, he would have won because of the failure of many 2004 George W. Bush supporters to vote for John McCain. “Bush voters’ decisions not to vote or to support Obama were a sufficient condition for Obama’s victory,” Lupia wrote in “Did Bush Voters Cause Obama’s Victory?” a paper published in PS, the journal of the American Political Science Association.
Romney and the Republican Party must achieve the highest possible turnout level among whites. Republicans, including Romney, have adopted anti-immigration stands that have extinguished the possibility of boosting margins among Hispanics. Asian Americans have become increasingly Democratic, self-identifying in public opinion surveys as Democratic rather than Republican by a 52-32 margin. African Americans remain reliably loyal to the Democratic Party by an 86 to 8 percent margin.
Romney is particularly vulnerable to a campaign designed to suppress turnout because his support is more tepid than Obama’s.
A New York Times/CBS poll released on Wednesday found that 52 percent of Obama voters back their candidate strongly, compared to 29 percent of Romney voters. In addition, a third of Romney’s voters say they are voting for him because of their dislike of Obama, while only 8 percent of Obama voters are primarily motivated by their hostility to Romney.
Vote suppression is important for Obama because his numbers among whites without degrees are worsening, despite the omnipresence of anti-Romney ads in the battleground states. Obama’s 29 percent level of support among non-college white men in the Quinnipiac poll cited above is a drop from 32 percent in its April survey, and the 28 percent level in the ABC/Washington Post poll is a drop from 34 percent in their May survey.
With his margins in this group falling, Obama directly benefits from every white non-college voter who stays home and does not vote for Romney. The importance of vote suppression in a close contest can be seen in the following hypothetical: say there are 1,000 voters evenly split, 500 to 500. Candidate A persuades just one of the voters backing his opponent to fail to go to the polls. Candidate A wins 500 to 499.