This week’s election results remind us that factors other than the ideologies and performance of candidates often determine the outcomes. One such factor is voter turnout. Campaign strategists and politicos often cite President Obama’s ability to mobilize the minority vote as a major factor in his successful 2008 and 2012 presidential bids. In those elections, down-ballot candidates politically aligned with the president benefitted from this galvanized voter pool. Not so in off-cycle elections, during which the vast majority of the country’s 500,000 elected officials win office—and which aren’t held on Election Day. (Note that midterm elections, like last night’s, aren’t off-cycle; midterms are held on Election Day, just like presidential ones.) So what does this mean? How are these elections different? And who benefits? These are the sorts of questions that Sarak F. Anzia tackles in her new book, Timing and Turnout. Anzia argues that organized groups have more influence in off-cycle elections because the voters they mobilize have a greater relative impact due to smaller overall turnout. Take teacher unions: Anzia offers data showing that educators operating under school boards whose members are elected off-cycle have higher salaries than those whose boards are constructed on federal election days. Other data demonstrate that, during such elections, voters who sympathize with teachers’ union ideology compose a larger percentage of the voting bloc, bolstering like-minded candidates. So, Anzia asks: Do these elections enhance democracy by increasing the public’s opportunities to choose their officials? Or do they marginalize the broader electorate by decreasing turnout and allowing the overrepresentation of organized factions concentrating disproportionally on a single set of issues?
SOURCE: Sarah F. Anzia, Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups, The University of Chicago Press, 2014.