San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
MAIL-BALLOT RETURN RATE SUGGESTS MANY STRUGGLING TO MAKE CHOICE
Voters holding on to them longer than in last presidential race
California officials moved the state’s presidential primary up from June to March this year so voters could have more say in the nationwide outcome. But what if the voters aren’t ready to speak?
With Super Tuesday two days away, and the Golden
State poised to deliver delegates that could make or break some of the campaigns, many Democrats in San Diego County and elsewhere are still anguishing over which candidate to support. They’ve been wringing their hands during dinner-table discussions, pondering “what ifs” in phone conversations with friends. Saturday, they watched the primary results from South Carolina for more evidence of which way the electoral wind is blowing.
And they’ve been holding on to their mail ballots.
Four years ago, during the last presidential primary, about 23 percent of mail voters statewide had returned their ballots by five days before the election. This year: 16 percent.
In San Diego County, where the lion’s share of a record 1.8 million registered voters get mail ballots, the return rate was about 17 percent, down from 25 percent at the same juncture four years ago.
“I was expecting more to be in by now,” said Michael Vu, the county registrar of voters, especially since the ballots now come with pre-paid return postage. He and Will Rodriguez-kennedy, chair of the San Diego County Democratic Party, said they suspect at least some of the delay is because of fence-sitting among those casting Democratic ballots.
Another sign of that: Political Data Inc., a Los Angeles County firm, tracks voters who have cast ballots in the last five elections. Four years ago, 54 percent of Democrats in the group had already returned their mail ballots, according to Paul Mitchell, a company vice president. This year it was 38 percent.
“When you have a lower performance among the higher-performing voters, you have to wonder why,” Mitchell said. “They are going to vote, but they haven’t yet. I think that lines up with the anecdotal evidence we’ve been seeing that people are waiting to vote because they just haven’t decided.”
In San Marcos, one of four satellite early voting locations open in the county Saturday, Matt Lumsden of Carlsbad admitted to waiting until the last minute to make up his mind.
“I figured it out on the spot when I got in there,” he said. “It’s not an easy decision. We want to put our best foot forward, and we have a lot of good feet.”
Democrat Sebastian Johnson of San Diego said he still hadn’t made up his mind Saturday.
“I need to do a lot more research before I have an opinion,” he said. “I need to do some digging and find out who they are as people.”
San Diego State University student Stevie Yannarell also was undecided.
“Honestly, I really haven’t watched the debates,” he said. “I’ll probably go to the polling place on Election Day and decide.”
Primary calculations
California is one of 14 states holding primaries Tuesday, and like all the others, it isn’t just for Democrats. But with no major opposition to President Donald Trump on the Republican side, most eyes have been on the Democratic tussle between more than a half-dozen candidates.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has a commanding lead in the California polls, 2-1 over his nearest rival in a recent survey done for the Los Angeles Times by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. But Mitchell, the Political Data executive, said he suspects most of the uncertain voters have been weighing which of the other candidates to support.
Thad Kousser, chair of the political science department at UC San Diego, agreed. “One clear dynamic is this: People who want a more moderate candidate than Bernie Sanders are trying to figure out which one to coalesce around,” he said. “That explains a lot of the fluidity we’re seeing in the race.”
Part of the calculation among some voters is the way the delegates are apportioned. A candidate has to win 15 percent of the vote, either statewide or in individual congressional districts, to collect delegates. In the UC Berkeley poll, only Sanders, at 34 percent, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, at 17 percent, crossed that threshold statewide, so any votes going to the other candidates wouldn’t matter, and those two would divide the delegates (144 are handed out in that part of the tabulation).
So if you’re trying to decide between Warren and, say, former Vice President Joe Biden (8 percent in the poll), do you vote for Warren to help keep her above the 15 percent line? That kind of math may be why some voters are waiting until the last minute to decide.
“If I voted by mail, I would want to see what happened in South
Carolina first,” Kousser said.
A larger share of California’s delegates, 271, are distributed by congressional district, and the same 15 percent threshold applies. The recent poll suggests Sanders will gather delegates in all 53 of the districts, and Warren in about half. Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor, and Michael Bloomberg, former New York mayor, are in line to get delegates in about one-quarter of the districts, the Berkeley poll shows. Biden and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar could get shut out.
The forecasting website Fivethirtyeight has a different prediction. Its simulations have Sanders collecting an average of 225 California delegates, followed by Biden (92), Warren (53), Bloomberg (32) and Buttigieg (12).
While many voters are holding on to their mail-in ballots, many others are committed to their candidates.
In San Marcos, five people already were in line when the satellite voting location opened at 8 a.m. Saturday, and a steady f low arrived throughout the morning.
Stephanie Singleton of Oceanside cast her vote for Sanders, a candidate she said she believes will return the country to civility.
“I believe we all should work together and have a purpose,” she said. “And I don’t think that has happened in the last four years.
Singleton said she wants a president who will give hope to her two grown children.
“He seems to want to make sure everybody is involved in our government, including young people,” she said about Sanders.
While James Zimmerman said he is committed to Biden because of his experience, his daughter, Michaela, describes herself as a “Warren girl.”
“I really don’t want a billionaire running this country, and that includes Bloomberg,” she said, adding that she probably would vote for him if her were the nominee.
Malik Thornton of Spring Valley is 18 and voting in his first election. He also likes Warren.
“I like that she has a lot of policies similar to Bernie, but I feel she has a better chance of beating Trump than Bernie does,” he said. “And I’d really like to see a woman president in my lifetime.”
All of which is to say that the undecided voters could bring significant swing to the final counts. That’s why several of the campaigns were busy this weekend locally with neighborhood canvassing, phone banks and get-out-thevote gatherings of volunteers. Buttigieg is scheduled to make an appearance here Monday night.
Final results won’t be known for some time until after the election. Mail ballots postmarked by March 3 and delivered by March 6 will still be counted. And people who aren’t registered to vote can do so up to and even on Election Day, and then will be allowed to vote provisionally. If their registrations turn out to be valid, their votes will be counted.
Vu, the registrar, is encouraging eligible voters who haven’t registered (there are about 400,000 in the county) to do so early. The registrar’s office in Kearny Mesa and satellite offices in San Marcos, Carmel Mountain, Spring Valley and Chula Vista will be open this weekend and Monday, as well as on Election Day. Similarly, he encouraged mail-ballot voters to turn in their tallies early at the registrar’s office, the satellite locations, or any of 60 branch libraries around the county, instead of taking them to the polling places Tuesday.
Vu said because of the expanded registration opportunities, he’s not making turnout predictions for the election. In the 2016 presidential primary, turnout was 50.9 percent. The November 2018 midterm elections drew 66.4 percent.
“There was a lot of energy behind that last election,” Vu said. “How much of that is still there going into the primary?”
Non-partisans not voting?
San Diego has the third largest population of “No-party Preference” voters, behind only Santa Clara and San Francisco among the state’s 58 counties. At about 29 percent, the group is smaller than the Democrats (38 percent) and larger than the Republicans (27 percent). And many of those voters will have an impact on the presidential primary, too — by not voting.
By law, non-partisan voters can ask for the ballot of any political party that allows them to cross over, which in this election includes the Democratic one (as well as the American Independent and the Libertarian parties) without having to re-register. The Republican, Green and Peace and Freedom parties are not allowing crossovers.
So far, only about 70,000 of the county’s 530,000 non-partisan voters have arranged to participate in the presidential primary, according to the registrar’s office, and the vast majority intend to cast ballots in the Democratic race. Assuming that the others have a similar interest, but haven’t taken steps or figured out how to cross over, that’s hundreds of thousands of votes that could be left on the table in a race where they could make the difference between who gets delegates and who doesn’t.
Non-partisan voters, who no matter what will still get ballots with the other contests on them, can sign up for the presidential race, too, in the remaining days before, and even on, Election Day. Vu is encouraging them to do so early, too, and help avoid long lines at the county’s 1,500 polling places on Tuesday.
At least two non-partisan voters did show up in the first hour at the San Marco voting location, including Rudy Rodriguez of Vista.
When he arrived, Rodriguez learned that he could ask for a cross-over ballot and vote for a Democrat in the presidential election. Instead, he decided to change his registration to Democrat.
“I just wanted to vote for Biden,” he said. “I’m not a Bernie man. I don’t think we can pay off $60 trillion with his plan.”
Rodriguez said he made up his mind during the debates, and he switched from supporting Klobuchar because she wasn’t doing well in the polls.
“My heart was with Amy, but my head is with Joe Biden now,” he said.
Super Tuesday gets its name because so many states are voting, and so many delegates are at stake — especially with California joining the lineup instead of waiting until June, when in past primary seasons the nominations have been all but decided. But Kousser, the UC San Diego political scientist, said the move hasn’t exactly worked out as planned.
Part of the idea behind the move “was to accentuate our voice and give candidates a reason to come to our state and campaign the way they do in Iowa,” said. “The elected officials expected to be courted for their endorsements.” That hasn’t happened much, in part because it’s so expensive to campaign in a state as large as this one, he said.
There was also an expectation that voting earlier would force candidates to address issues that matter to Californians. Kousser said there have been nods to traditional issues here — the environment, jobs, higher education, immigration — but not much about what has emerged as a pressing concern: homelessness.
Still, California is the big prize this time around, and that alone will make people pay attention to the results, even if the candidate who captures the most delegates might not go on to win the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in July.
The last time California had an early primary, on Super Tuesday in February 2008, Hillary Clinton finished first, ahead of the person who went on to win the party nomination and then the White House: Barack Obama.