The Turnout Revolution
- 01.08.2008 - 3:23 PMAs in Iowa on Thursday, the big story out of New Hampshire is a colossal turnout among those wanting to vote Democratic — double the number in 2004 in Iowa and who knows how many more than usual in New Hampshire, where the Secretary of State’s office had to print up new ballots and drive them to various polling places across the state. Aside from the obvious fact here, which is that Barack Obama is likely to bury Hillary Clinton in an avalanche when the tallies are completed tonight, it is time to accept the altered nature of the political landscape in the United States. Sluggish voter participation in major U.S. elections is a thing of the past. Increasingly, Americans are interested in and enthusiastic about going to the voting booth. That is due in part to new technologies that have been devised to identify non-voters, which has allowed well-designed political campaigns to use person-to-person persuasion to get the slugs to leave their homes on Election Day. These new technologies entirely benefited the Republicans, who spent tens of millions of dollars putting them in place between 2000 and 2004. Once Democrats saw how effective they were, Democrats spent the same boodle on their own systems and ended the Republican advantage. Add to that the sense of empowerment provided to so many by the Internet and the net result is a transformation few would have believed possible. It’s, in a way, a parallel to the crime drop of the 1990s — no one ever imagined civic culture in the United States would actually improve, that the trend lines were grounds only for pessimism. But just as the New York City in which I live now is better in very nearly every respect from the city I grew up in in the 1960s and 1970s because its civic life was restored, so it is with the civic life in the United States, at least as measured by voting.
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