Voter Turnout Hinges On Neighborhoods

by Tony West

The best way to improve voter turnout is see to it that voters are stable, middle-class citizens who own their own homes and don’t plan to move.

That’s the chief takeaway from a look at Philadelphia’s voter turnout in the May 19 Democratic primary election.

On an average, 29% of registered Democrats cast votes in the hotly contested mayoral primary. (Figures for total registrations as of May have not yet been released by the County Board of Elections; the number of registrations as of the November 2014 general election can be used as a proxy.)

The low voter participation is found in off-campus areas and the Caribbean Latino barrio of Kensington.

Turnout varied considerably between the city’s 67 wards, ranging from a high of 44% in Ward Leader Dan Muroff’s 9^th Ward to a low of 11% in State Rep. Angel Cruz’s 7^th Ward. It’s not just Cruz who faces challenges turning out his registered Dems; Carlos Matos in the 19^th, Tommy Johnson in the 25^th, Donna Aument in the 33^rd and Emilio Vásquez in the 43^rd all struggle with it too.

Turnout matters in city politics. Shrewd citywide candidates will pay more attention to high-producing wars than to low-producing ones.

There are two parts of the city where a culture of voting is fairly healthy: the Far Northwest and Lower South Philly. The neighborhoods of Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, Cedarbrook and W. Oak Lane range from tidy middle-class row homes to affluent estates and they are socially and culturally diverse; but Ron Couser’s 22^nd Ward and Marian Tasco’s 50^th Ward produced more than 40% turnout in the primary. At the other end of town, Ron Donatucci, Rosanne Pauciello and Matty Myers in the 26^th and 39^th Wards did equally well.

Most of the rest of Northwest and South Philadelphia voted above average, as did the Far Northeast; outer West Philly; and Center City West, Fairmount and Brewerytown. A dash of affluence helps turnout, but it is far from the only factor involved.

In the poorer, older working-class neighborhoods of the Southwest, North and Near Northeast, voter participation drops below the average. The same is true for the River Wards and Center City East.

Why is voter turnout so low in Hispanic Kensington? Remember we’re not talking about immigrants here. All these people are citizen voters. Still, many Latino Philadelphians still have strong ties in Puerto Rico or abroad, so their civic energies are split. Typically they come here to work, not to vote.

An expert ward leader offers one answer. “It’s the ‘motor-voter’ effect,” this old election pro opines. In this community, a lot of people are registered to vote at PennDOT when they sign up for their drivers’ licenses. They need their licenses, so they’ll sign anything else while they’re at the DMV office. They count as registered voters, but they don’t actually care about voting. High motor-voter registrations, then, may depress official voter turnout here.

Off-campus areas reflect a different mathematical challenge: voters who are no longer there but who can’t be stricken from the voter rolls under federal law.

Carol Jenkins, who heads the 27^th Ward, explained what happens in University City and around Temple University in North Central by showing on on-campus street list on which one-third of the names had not voted for two presidential programs and thus are flagged for removal later – but not yet. She estimates another one-third have moved out of the neighborhood, often out of state by now. They may be voting up a storm in California, but canceling their voter registration in Philadelphia was the last thing on their mind when they moved.

So Jenkins and her colleagues Bernadette Wyche in the 24^th, George Brooks in the 47^th and Shirley Kitchen in the 20^th should get an “A for their wards, where official turnout is below 20%. If one could eliminate student ghost voters, their real turnout might double.

High transient student and young-adult populations may also reduce voter-turnout measures around Jefferson and University of the Arts, so the 5^th and 8^th Ward voting rate may be higher than it seems among real current residents.

All this said – how much can a good or bad ward leader push their numbers one way or another? Geography and demography are destiny…. Hard to tell from one sample. But a rule of thumb some observers cite is 4%.

Frank Oliver’s 29^th Ward in Brewerytown may be an example of a ward that over performs with a 36% turnout in a neighborhood that has seen a smack of gentrification but is mostly old-school North Philly. Bringing out 36%, Oliver shows it is possible to get poor minority voters to vote just as if they were rich and powerful. Now 93, Oliver made a huge difference in his community throughout a long career in the State House of Representatives, and as Treasurer of the Democratic City Committee of Philadelphia. He was good at what he did and he built a sound ward election machine.

Presumably other ward leaders deliver less than the full potential of their wards. It’s hard to tease out low vote totals that stem solely from their not giving at the office.

But some observers have long noted that Tommy Johnson’s 25^th Ward underperforms his peers Helen Farrell in the 18^th, Peg Rzepski in the 31^st and Connie Dougherty in the 41^st.

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