Markos Moulitsas has famously opined that when Democrats turn out, we win. That wisdom also probably applies more broadly to heads-up political contests in general. So, if there turns out to be a big difference in the scale, scope and effectiveness of our respective Democratic candidates’ GOTV operations, in Tuesday’s New York Presidential Primary, shared wisdom on this subject suggests that the candidate with substantially more effective GOTV may very well run stronger than predicted.
It happens that Bernie Sanders might have a much more robust and effective GOTV operation for the New York Primary than Hillary Clinton’s. Here are three stories from New York.
First story: Bill Clinton, yesterday,
seemed low on energy Saturday morning, when he spoke in a husky voice at a get-out-the-vote event in Albany, the first of the day’s four upstate campaign stops.
“Let’s take a deep breath,” he pleaded to a crowd of 450. “We spend too much time screaming at each other. We need to be neighbors again.”
The germane fact reported here is that the former President is drawing crowds of about 500 around upstate New York.
Second story: Meanwhile, the candidate herself is holding a GOTV event in Staten Island, New York, in a beautiful historical hall that accommodates a maximum of “350 guests”. This is the only remaining New York event for Hillary Clinton before the primary on Tuesday. These crowd size figures are for explicitly GOTV events for the Clinton campaign. These figures hardly say everything one needs to know in order to judge the effectiveness of a GOTV operation in a state as vast as New York. But they do say something. They especially say something germane when compared, not to the crowd sizes for Bernie’s campaign appearances, but an even more interesting crowd size.
Third story: As reported by roonie, a GOTV rally for Bernie drew thousands of volunteers into the streets of lower Manhattan, on the very doorstep of Wall Street, marching between Foley Square and Union Square. They didn’t turn out to hear Bernie speak. Bernie wasn't there. They already know what he has to say. These people turned out to work on GOTV.
In an interesting geographic side note, marching from Foley Square to Union Square in Manhattan will actually take one from New York’s 10th Congressional District to the 12th Congressional District. Many extra delegates can be won by running up big margins in multiple congressional districts under Democratic Party delegate allocation rules. This sort of GOTV activism seems extraordinary, if not unprecedented in American elections.
In the world of GOTV, it makes a difference whether a candidate has hundreds, or instead, thousands of volunteer workers to contact voters for the campaign. Robocalls and advertising are no substitute, and often no contest, for effective GOTV, compared to live voter contact. Or at least it is supposed to be that way.
If Hillary Clinton wins New York’s pledged delegates in the 55-45 split now seemingly predicted by polling, it will be a staggering but not crippling blow to the Sanders campaign. Anything closer at some point begins to look like a defeat for Clinton and would do much less harm to Senator Sanders’ campaign. In the final hours, polls go more or less dark, but GOTV is still going strong. New York may be very close and if there is record turnout, it will probably benefit Bernie Sanders.