Democrats Lost on the Registration Front

What wins elections? Registering new voters, or beaming television ads at voters already registered? Michael Dukakis invited defeat by relying on high-powered hucksters and ignoring local doorbell-ringers. Ronald Reagan’s unique effectiveness in reaching registered voters via the air waves distracted Dukakis from the hum-drum technique of adding new voters to the rolls. No one told him that a successful Democratic presidential campaign needs to register new voters and to bring out old reliables.

Well into the TV era, registering eligible voters has proved to be a reliable base-broadening strategy for Democrats. Dukakis could have carried California and still lost. But he never could have won without it. He lost it at the precinct level.

California has the country’s largest bloc of registered voters. It offered Dukakis his largest potential reservoir of unregistered voters. Last spring almost 6.5 million of California’s nearly 19 million eligibles remained unregistered--most of them poor whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians largely indifferent to politics, or disillusioned, overlooked by Reaganomics, barely getting by. Once registered Democratic, they would not have agonized over how to vote.

California’s Democrats calculated that registering just 1 million underprivileged new voters would guarantee them a safe majority. But California’s Republicans supplemented their usual TV strategy by stealing Democratic thunder and staging a registration drive of their own. They enrolled nearly 750,000, mainly white, among the well-heeled.

The Dukakis high command in Boston ignored the challenge. Instead, its strategists regarded California as a source of money to bring East, and as a target for TV ads brain-trusted in the East. Thanks to Boston’s de-emphasis on registration, and to its concentration on raising money from “limousine liberals,” California’s Democrats wound up running only neck-and-neck with the Republicans in the registration race, not twice as fast, and focusing on the faithful.

The California senatorial campaign in 1986 proved that registering is winning politics, while advertising is a high-cost gamble. The Republican candidate had money to burn, and he burned enough of it on TV advertising to establish himself as the clear favorite. Sen. Alan Cranston concentrated his funds on an all-out registration drive to broaden his base. He came from behind in the polls to win by a margin of just over 100,000. The side that used its money to register voters one-by-one bested the side that lavished its war chest spraying messages to millions.

Also in 1986 five Southern Democratic senatorial campaigns demonstrated the national scope of the registration strategy. Jesse Jackson organized a huge precampaign registration drive in these states at virtually no cost. All five Republican candidates had the money to play the advertising game, and they did. In addition, Ronald Reagan gave each the benefit of saturation publicity in their behalf. Yet all five Democratic candidates, relying on registration, eased over the top with only a third of the white vote. This year Jackson has been making news, not signing up voters. The black “no-shows,” almost half of those not voting, represented Dukakis’ margin of defeat.

New York, where Dukakis squeaked by, told the same story--but in reverse. Not until word leaked out that the Democrats failed to enroll their unregistered reserves did George Bush’s forces wake up to their chance of scoring an undreamed-of victory. Nevertheless, the GOP called off its effort.

Until this year nearly 90% of all registrants voted in presidential elections. But of 170 million eligible, only 105 million--61.8%--are registered. Of the remaining 65 million, no less than two-thirds subsist on sub-median incomes--obvious targets for Democratic registration. If Dukakis had been content to count bodies instead of arguing, he could have put his talent for organization to work, ensuring himself a landslide. In that case he would also have indulged his preference for frugality. Buying boomerangs on Madison Avenue is expensive. Registering voters is cheap.

The Bush campaign started with a negative message; the Dukakis campaign started with no message, and ended up sending a negative message, too. The rival campaigns shot TV spots at each other as live ammunition. Both sides wasted no end of money on a high-cost habit, and the Democrats missed a low-cost opportunity.