Low Voter Turnout Likely To Cost Democrats Control Of Indianapolis City-County Council

Early voting is over in Marion County and while voting picked up considerably in the closing days before tomorrow's municipal election, there were 6,318 fewer votes cast to date than during the 2011 election when Mayor Greg Ballard's re-election margin over Democrat Melina Kennedy was only about 7,500 votes in an election where 30% of the registered voters participated. This year's election appears destined to fall below the 26% turnout number in the 2007 election when a little-known, unfunded Ballard upset Mayor Bart Peterson by a little more than 5,300 votes.

It's too soon for Joe Hogsett's campaign to panic about his chances in tomorrow's election, but it appears that his likely victory could come without the Democratic majority on the City-County Council he expected to have during his first term in office. Unless tomorrow's unseasonably warm weather leads to a much larger turnout than we've seen to date, Republicans appear poised to capture at least 13 of the contested City-County Council seats, one more than they need to recapture control of the 25-member council downsized by four from its current count following the elimination of the four at-large council seats currently held by Democrats.

After early voting concluded today, there were 2,680 fewer walk-in voters and 3,638 fewer mail-in absentee ballots cast compared to four years ago. That's 31% fewer walk-in voters and 40% fewer mail-in absentee ballots than cast in 2011. The absentee ballot numbers will improve slightly as late-arriving ballots are received, but that number will likely be no more than about 300 votes. If the early voting trends hold out, election turnout will fall below 25%, which is very bad news for Democratic hopes of winning control of the City-County Council.

Here's why that turnout percentage is so critical to Democrats. By boosting turnout by just 4 percentage points in 2011, Democrats were able to capture 11,910 more votes for their mayoral and council candidates through a larger number of straight ticket voters, 61,570 in 2011 compared to 49,660 in 2007. By comparison, Republicans picked up only 2,232 more straight-ticket votes from the higher turnout vote in 2011 than their mayoral and council candidates received in 2007, 49,423 compared to 47,191 in 2007. Making matters worse for the Democrats is the absence of a Libertarian mayoral candidate. Their candidates captured 2,677 and 3,787 votes, respectively, in the 2011 and 2007 mayoral elections. Conventional wisdom says Libertarians candidates draw more votes from a Republican candidate than a Democratic candidate.

One big difference between this year's election and the last two mayoral elections is the absence of any independent polling data. Late polls in 2007 showed Ballard, who was outspent by Peterson by a 10-1 margin, running about even with the incumbent candidate who had been expected to win the race by a landslide. In 2011, polling data showed Ballard with a comfortable lead over Kennedy, who polled much better on election day than she did in any polls taken prior to the election. The higher turnout boosted her vote total, allowing her to hold Ballard to the same 51% winning margin he won by in 2007 despite having high name recognition and a large campaign war chest to finance a very visible campaign compared to his shoe-string budget in 2007. The higher voter turnout proved decisive in allowing Democrats to recapture control of the City-County Council, which the Republicans had won back from the Democrats in 2007.

If Democrats fail to win control of the City-County Council or win the mayor's race by a significant percentage, there will be a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing in Democratic circles. Some critics are already blaming Hogsett's campaign for taking black voters for granted. Hogsett's strategy clearly was focused on winning over voters who like the job Ballard has been doing for the past 8 years as opposed to winning over those who see many shortcomings in Ballard's two-term tenure. Many blacks have felt slighted by Ballard for the past 8 years, but knowledgeable sources say Hogsett failed to tap into their deep discontent towards the current city administration. Hogsett never once criticized Ballard's record as mayor, and he and his Republican opponent, Chuck Brewer, appeared to agree on every major issue discussed during the campaign. Some think Hogsett also hurt himself among black voters when he refused to pledge to retain IMPD Chief Rick Hite during an appearance with his opponent on black radio last week during which his Republican opponent vowed to retain Hite. Hogsett seemed more worried about offending the FOP, which endorsed him, than assuaging black voters.

Brewer's greatest failing has been his inability to distinguish himself from his Democratic opponent. Although he's been a resident of Indianapolis for only four years and has never run for political office before, he spent much of the campaign hitching himself to Ballard's coattails and trying to connect to political insiders, while Hogsett, the insider's insider, spent the last two months of the campaign trying to cast himself as an outsider who would take on the downtown insiders. Despite Hogsett's higher name recognition and 4-1 campaign spending advantage, his track record of winning campaigns is not good. He won his first race by upsetting then-Mayor Bill Hudnut in a Secretary of State's race and then lost three successive races for the U.S. Senate, Congress and Attorney General in races where his political opponents easily painted him as a professional politician constantly running for office and running with a different wife in each successive campaign. Brewer waited until the closing week of the campaign to question Hogsett's obvious hypocrisy, which most believe was too little too late.