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Recent national poll results showing 81 percent of Republicans intend to vote in 2010 — compared to 56 percent of Democrats — indicate an “enthusiasm gap” between the parties, some analysts speculate. Statistics from the October 2009 municipal election in Albuquerque show that Republicans came out strong, while Democrats stayed home.
Overall turnout for the municipal election was low at 25 percent, but that won’t necessarily be the case in the 2010 general election. Nor can voters’ feelings about national politics be judged by the mayor’s race, political analyst and pollster Brian Sanderoff told The Independent.
One municipal election isn’t a great predictor of what will happen in 2010, when a new governor and lieutenant governor will be elected, and all of New Mexico’s U.S. congressional and state representatives will be up for re-election, he said. It’s more accurate to view what will happen in 2010 through the lens of the 2008 general election.
“I don’t equate the national mood to the non-partisan mayor’s race,” Sanderoff said. “In 2008 the Democrats were a lot more enthusiastic with Barack Obama than the Republicans were with John McCain. In 2010, we see a lot more Republicans upset with the status quo, so they’re more energized. The Democrats will be on the defensive — debating things like taxes, Obama, Bill Richardson.”
Nonetheless, comparison of the 2009 Albuquerque municipal election results with what happened in the 2005 municipal race show Democrats simply didn’t show up in 2009. It was a three-way non-partisan race, but so was the 2005 election, and the demographics of the three candidates were roughly the same: a conservative anglo male from the Heights, a downtown liberal Hispanic male, and a strong Hispanic centrist incumbent from the west side.
In 2009, Republican turnout increased by 272 people from the 2005 municipal election in Albuquerque. But 3,149 Democrats who voted in 2005 didn’t show up in October.
The Republican share of the vote in Albuquerque increased from 38.8 percent to 41.4 percent between 2005 and 2009, and their mayoral candidate, Richard Berry, won with 44 percent of the vote.
The Democratic share of those who actually voted declined from 49.6 percent to 48.4 percent in 2009.
And yet the Republican share of registered voters was down, from 35.4 percent to 32.3 percent, while the Democratic share was up, from 44.7 percent to 47.5 percent. The registration numbers reflect a surge in newly registered Democratic voters from 2008, the year of Obama, but the turn-out itself shows an engaged Republican electorate rather than a Democratic one.
In a nutshell, despite the wave of enthusiasm in 2008 that led the Democratic Party to significantly increase its share of statewide office holders and sweep up all of the U.S. congressional seats, its voters declined to show up in 2009 to help it retain the mayor’s seat or a majority on the city council in the state’s largest metropolitan area. On the other hand, a solid Republican base of voters can be seen getting out to vote in Albuquerque over time, regardless of the percentage of registered voters that the Republican Party holds.
Still, Sanderoff doesn’t think it’s wise to extrapolate from that showing to what will happen statewide in 2010.
“It’s hard to draw comparisons between a non-partisan municipal race with no party labels and a partisan general election,” he said. “General elections will have twice the turnout of a municipal race, plus, in 2009 you had the noise of Marty Chavez. He’s no liberal, and got his share of Republican and Independent votes as well. It was an impressive turnout for Republicans, but I’m more comfortable discussing what might happen in 2010 in light of the 2008 general election.”
The executive director of the Democratic Party, Scott Forrester, agrees with Sanderoff that 2010 shouldn’t be compared to the 2009 Albuquerque race. In the municipal race, the Democrats invested only $7,000-$8,000 to get out the vote, he said. No money was spent on trying to persuade voters to choose one candidate over another — unlike the major effort the Republican Party put in to support the Republican candidate for mayor, Richard Berry, who won.
Instead, he said, look at what the party did in 2008 to get an idea of what will happen in 2010.
“The Democratic Party put together a really good grassroots structure to win in 2008, county by county,” he said, “and we’ll do the same thing in 2010. You can expect that we’ll put together a multi-million dollar campaign together this year, organizing throughout New Mexico and reminding voters that we’ve come too far to start going backwards.”
But Republican Party leaders don’t seem worried.
“The key ingredient is whether or not there are strong qualified Republican candidates,” Republican spokesperson Janel Causey told The Independent.
And Republicans have strong candidates going into the election, added Ryan Cangliosi, executive director of the state Republican Party .
“Getting out the vote is the bottom line. If we don’t do that we’re in the wrong business,” he said. “We have strong candidates who will excite the electorate, and you can expect the party to put together an apparatus to get out the vote for those candidates.”
