An unusually low turnout in Tuesday's Illinois Democratic primary worries Democratic pollsters who fear that a strong Republican turnout -- combined with continued Democratic ambivalence at the ballot box -- could lead to a nightmare scenario come November.
"The Democratic drop-off was not a surprise," said Tom Jensen, Director of Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling organization. "For Republican numbers to go up, that's the surprise."
Tuesday's result "is yet another data point on the enthusiasm gap, showing that Republicans are much more excited about this year's elections than Democrats, even in a deep blue state," Jensen said.
Democratic National Committee spokesman Derrick Plummer downplayed the potential trouble for the Dems. "We're going to be running against the tide of history," he said. "The president's party has historically lost seats during midterm elections."
Public Policy Polling reported:
Based on the current numbers 885,268 voters were cast in the Democratic primary for Senate compared to 736,137 on the Republican side. Those numbers are awfully close to each other for a state that's overwhelmingly Democratic.
2002 was a similar election to 2010; in both years midterm elections and Ill.
gubernatorial races fell in the same year. In that year's gubernatorial primary, 1.25 million Democrats voted in the primary. In 2010, the turnout was 885,000 -- a 40 percent drop.
And that should give Democrats cause for concern in November. Daily Kos polling suggested that 46 percent of self-identified Democrats are either "not likely" to vote or "won't vote" in the 2010 midterm elections, compared with only 15 percent of self-identified Republicans and one quarter of independents.
Last month in Massachusetts, a strong lead for the Democratic candidate, Attorney General Martha Coakley, quickly turned into a stunning victory for the Republican underdog, Scott Brown. The GOP state senator trailed by double digits as close as ten days before the election, won the special election to fill the late Edward Kennedy's senate seat partly due to a low Democratic turnout. Roughly half of registered Democrats in the state voted, compared with three quarters of registered Republicans. To put that in perspective, Martha Coakley earned 44 percent of the votes cast for Barack Obama in 2008, while Scott Brown earned roughly the same number of the votes cast for Republican challenger John McCain two years ago.
"After Massachusetts, Democrats are too scared to do anything right now," Jensen said. "The reality is that if the election was [held] right now they'd lose badly whether they actually do anything or not, so they may as well accomplish something if they're going down anyway."
"We can combat lackluster effort," the DNC's Plummer said. "The President is getting out his message; he did it at the GOP House caucus and the State of the Union Address."
The problem, as explained by Ed Kilgore, managing editor of The Democratic Strategist is that the demographics don't favor Democratic candidates. "White seniors always represent a much higher share of the vote in midterms than in presidential years, while under-30 voters barely turn out at all," Kilgore wrote in an email to the Huffington Post. "Given Obama's exceptional weakness in the former category, and exceptional strength in the latter, 2010 was shaping up as a difficult year for Democrats even back when Obama's approval ratings were high."
"[Democrats] need to be able to show the party base accomplishment on the issues that are important to them -- things like health care and the environment," Jensen said. "Democratic voters need to feel that their getting out in 2006 and 2008 made a difference or else there isn't a lot of incentive to keep on coming out."