A courtroom artist could probably sketch their portraits.
The subjects in the picture? The people who will most likely decide who runs Congress, the state and county governments, and local schools. Statistics can pinpoint folks who will vote in Tuesday’s election. Such a prediction shouldn’t be so easy.
Nationwide, one out of five voters will be harsh critics of government who are socially conservative. Twenty-two percent will be staunch liberals. Another 18 percent will be business conservatives who like limited government but hold moderate views on issues such as immigration reform. Those three demographic groups comprise 37 percent of the general public, but account for 60 percent of likely voters Tuesday, according to statistical trends charted by the Pew Research Center.
Sixty-three percent of the voting-eligible population amounts to electoral wild cards, most of which will remain unplayed.
Pew puts them into five categories: the Next Generation Left (young folks, liberal on social issues but less so the social safety net), Young Outsiders (conservative on government, not so on social issues), Faith-and-Family Left (racially diverse and religious), Hard-Pressed Skeptics (financially stressed and pessimistic), and Bystanders (politically unengaged, unregistered, won’t vote). At best, together, they’ll constitute just 40 percent of those turning out Tuesday, if history repeats.
In terms of gender, women will likely play a less decisive role in this midterm (or non-presidential) election than in 2012, according to Women’s Voices Women Vote research. Two years ago, 53.6 percent of voters were female, with unmarried women making up 24 percent of the electorate. In midterms, though, the percentage of single and minority women turning out tends to drop.
Indiana struggles to break from such predictability because of our state’s weak civic engagement. The state ranks 42nd in voter registration and 40th in voter turnout, according to Pew. “We’re pretty low on the list,” said Carolyn Callecod, president of the Terre Haute chapter of the League of Women Voters. An embarrassingly scant 13 percent of Indiana’s 4.57 million registered voters cast ballots in May’s primary.
There’s a slight chance, though, that Hoosiers could show up in more impressive numbers Tuesday. The driver of that possible uptick in turnout? Education issues. Those range from the increase in public-funded vouchers for private school tuition to teacher evaluation reforms enacted under former Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett and topics of concern in local districts. School board races across Indiana are getting increased attention, said Amy Miller, president of the League of Women Voters of Indiana.
“That’s going to attract voters,” Miller said of school board races. “That’s going to help turnout.”
Particularly among Hoosier women. “I think the women are paying attention to the down-ticket races,” Miller said. The league sponsored candidate forums in many of the 20 Indiana towns where it has a chapter, including three in Terre Haute. School board contests bring the election closest to home.
“At a local level, people see it on a regular basis, especially if they have kids in school,” Miller said. “They feel like they must weigh in on it.”
The pathetic turnout in the May primary may not portend the same outcome Tuesday, she added. Indiana’s primary system dissuades many people from participating, because they’re forced to choose a Republican or Democratic ballot. And, technically, the Indiana law requires voters to then give a majority of their votes in the general election to that same party. Seems ridiculously un-American and unenforceable, right? (See Indiana Code 3-10 1-6.) Thus, primaries get decided by the strident party-hardliners. More independent people prefer to cast more private ballots in the general election.
The 13 percent turnout in May reflects a distaste for the primary system. “They just don’t feel their voice is important at that level,” Miller said.
But the league works to educate people that their votes do indeed matter, even in a low-turnout primary. In fact, with so few Hoosiers participating, a couple hundred votes or less decided many races last May. The same could be true in Tuesday’s general election in races for local seats on school boards, and county commissions and councils, as well as the offices of prosecutor, judge and sheriff.
“These offices affect [people’s] lives more than those on a state or national level,” Callecod said.
Nonetheless, the statistics indicate a majority of us will leave voting to somebody else.