Republicans worried about turnout for tomorrow's municipal elections.

WARNING: This is a Republican site but still an interesting article.


Scott Pressler, a Republican political activist and specialist in voter outreach, has made an ominous warning about voter apathy in the local and state elections this year. He is concerned that conservative voters will not be motivated after the big turnout for President Trump last November and will fail to show up at the polls. Historic voting patterns in Alaska tend to validate his concerns.

Except for the Mat-Su Borough, most communities in our state will conduct a joint city and borough election tomorrow. I live in Homer, and like most other towns in this state, presidential elections attract a large turnout. Unfortunately, off-cycle elections like tomorrow’s borough and city elections are typically very low-turnout affairs.

You can see Homer’s participation in presidential elections illustrated in Table 1. The city voter turnout is typically in the high 60% range, and often exceeds the national average. In the last three elections, the Republican candidate won by large majorities of 15-20%. We often hear that Homer is a liberal town, but not when it counts in presidential elections.

The same is not true for local elections, where Homer has a very low participation rate. The average voter turnout for the last four city and borough elections was an anemic 19.77%, and in all of these city council elections except one, the more liberal candidate won. What’s worse, the winning margin of victory was only 285 votes! The liberals barely squeak out a victory. If conservatives had turned out in the same numbers they do for presidential elections, it would have assured a conservative majority on our city council. However, in these off-cycle local elections, it seems like the Republicans stay home, gifting victory to the liberals.




https://mustreadalaska.com/greg-sarber-will-conservatives-turn-out-for-tomorrows-local-elections/