The lower turnout that typifies off-cycle contests enhances the electoral influence of organized groups and their members or active supporters. This happens for two main reasons:
Voters with the most at stake turn out at high rates regardless of when the election is scheduled — and many of these intensely motivated voters are members of organized groups. Overall, members of organized groups tend to cast higher proportions of the ballots in off-cycle elections.
Organized groups regularly get actively involved in elections. But when overall turnout is low, as it tends to be in off-years or months, their efforts at mobilization have a larger impact on the outcome.
The Politics of Election Timing
The fact that mobilized supporters of organized groups make up a greater proportion of voters in off-cycle elections has big consequences for election outcomes and public policy. Because this reality is usually well understood by the people involved, politicians, policymakers, and organized groups have always contended over the scheduling of elections. In the 19th century, city and state officials regularly tampered with election timing to benefit preferred candidates. And in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, progressive reformers made off-cycle local elections standard throughout the United States. Reformers argued that separating local and national elections would encourage voters to focus on local issues, but these reformers also believed that their preferred candidates would fare better in off-cycle elections.
Even if organized groups favor off-cycle elections, citizens in general think differently. When I surveyed a representative sample of U.S. voters, the vast majority of both Democrats and Republicans said they would prefer to have local elections on the same day as national elections.
Given such citizen preferences, why are most local elections still held off-cycle? Over the past decade, state legislatures have considered hundreds of bills to consolidate elections, yet almost all have failed to pass — in large part because groups that benefit from off-cycle timing fight such changes. For example, I found that teachers’ unions and school board associations often turn up to testify against bills that would move school elections on-cycle. Somewhat surprisingly, Democrats generally vote to preserve off-cycle timing, while Republicans more often vote to move school board elections into alignment with national or state contests.
Policy Payoffs for the Organized
Low-turnout, off-cycle elections not only enhance the voting clout of organized groups; such elections also open the door to policies especially beneficial to organized constituencies.
To estimate possible benefits from the off-cycle timing of school board elections, I looked at data on teacher salaries in eight states that have some districts with on-cycle elections and others with off-cycle elections.