The conventional wisdom holds that primary turnout in California is generally weak unless there is a particularly contested election of note or a high-profile, high-stakes ballot measure. This June 7, with the presidential nominations largely determined for both parties, most observers have low expectations.

But the National University System Institute for Policy Research thinks we’re in for a surprise. The San Diego university recently released a policy brief that predicts at least half of San Diego County residents will vote — up at least 13 percent from the June 2012 primary. 

This is based on a huge surge in voter registration in the county — a development that has also been seen statewide, with similar implications.

“California is experiencing historic growth in new voter registrations; more than 850,000 voters have registered between January 1st and March 31st of this year. This registration figure is twice the total from January 1st to March 31st in 2012. As noted by elections analyst Paul Mitchell in Capitol Weekly, the last time the state voter rolls grew in the 18 months prior to a presidential primary election was in 1980,” the National University report said.

“San Diego County is no exception – using registration reports from the San Diego County Registrar of Voters, we found countywide registration increased a net 50,977 voters from January 5th to April 30th. Most of the net change in partisan registration was among Democratic voters, further increasing the small registration lead the Democratic Party has over the GOP in San Diego County.”

This influx of voters is “younger, more diverse and more Democratic-leaning,” the policy brief noted.

“Demographically, they largely fit the profile of Bernie Sanders supporters,” Vince Vasquez, senior policy analyst at National University System Institute for Policy Research, told KPBS. “How many will vote down ticket, and what are the campaigns doing to appeal to these new voters? We’ll find out on election night.”

Is social media leading to more young liberals voting?

The report doesn’t speculate on why voting might be higher than normal. But the Obama campaign’s successful “microtargeting” of voters in 2012 is seen as having created new ways to reach and lobby younger voters. In the last month before the 2012 election, the Obama campaign unveiled a new tactic that it credited with leading to a surge in youth voting. Time magazine’s election post-mortem had details:

Half the campaign’s targeted swing-state voters under age 29 had no listed phone number. They lived in the cellular shadows, effectively immune to traditional get-out-the-vote efforts. … But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. …. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. … 

The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind.

This social media-access access often appears to lead to increasingly “pure” liberal views and is reflected in Sanders’ huge lead over Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton among voters under 30.

Trump seen as spurring Hispanics to register

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported Thursday that another candidate besides Sanders may be bringing out California voters: Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is spurring a record number of citizenship applications and increases in voter registration among Latinos upset by the candidate’s rhetoric and fearful of his plans to crack down on immigration. …. 

In California, the number of Hispanics registering to vote doubled in the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2012, according to state data.

Now an effort is being launched to see whether “Big Data” might be able to reduce California’s often-awful urban gridlock. Fortune magazine has the details:

Los Angeles’ snarled, rage-inducing roads have been infamous for decades. And now, thanks to a tech industry-fueled population explosion, San Francisco is right behind L.A. in the title race for Worst Traffic in America.

 

AT&T, UC Berkeley and California’s state transportation authority are testing a new way to get a grip on the situation — by collecting and analyzing drivers’ cellphone location data. The study leads insist that users’ privacy is protected, and the information could revolutionize how we plan and manage highways and transit.

 

“The idea of using cellular data for mobility is not very new,” admits Alexei Pozdnukhov, assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Smart Cities program. “What is new … is that our approach is much more detailed modeling. We can simulate very detailed scenarios, and answer questions.”

L.A. and Bay Area the initial focus

Traffic can be horrible in other parts of the state — San Diego and Sacramento freeways are often brutally clogged in the morning and evening rush hours, and the 75-mile section of the Interstate 15 corridor from Lake Elsinore to Hesperia is a common target of Sigalerts during daylight hours because of heavy commercial traffic. But the initial focus will be on the biggest population centers:

The new California projects — Connected Corridors in Los Angeles, and SmartBay in San Francisco — are something like Google Maps on steroids. They compile region-wide cell data into big portraits, not just of where traffic is most congested, but of overall daily patterns.

 

“[It shows] where people … work, where they go for shopping, where they go for leisure, and how they choose to get there,” says Pozdnukhov. Dr. Compin says that’s “the holy grail” of transit planning.

 

The data will help planners develop detailed responses to congestion events — Compin says there are a stunning 5,000 to 6,000 events per year on the I-210 corridor, making up about 50 percent of traffic delays. By working closely with local authorities and public transit providers, Caltrans hopes to make better decisions about how to re-route traffic onto parallel corridors and local roads, and communicate changes to commuters more smoothly. The San Francisco pilot is centered on Interstate 80, and among other things, says Pozdnukhov, hopes to determine the potential impact of increased development on the Treasure Island neighborhood the highway passes through.

Research can be basis of driverless-car grid

The effort depicted by the Fortune article could end up being as tantamount to a crucial first step toward establishing a grid for driverless cars. Such a grid could steer traffic in certain directions based on algorithms anticipating optimal vehicle flow. The theory is this could be done in a way that would dramatically reduce gridlock.

Studies also emphasize how an orderly computer-run traffic grid of autonomous cars could sharply reduce pollution, especially if the cars were hybrids or otherwise didn’t have internal combustion engines.

By Chris Reed

I have interviewed Tony Quinn for my old radio shows several times and acknowledge he knows way more about California politics than I do. But he is flatly, simply wrong when he writes the following about what brought people to the polls Nov. 6:

“The good news for Republicans is that they are no longer a dying party.  The bad news is that they are dead, and the final dagger into the corpse was the huge turnout of young voters on Tuesday – the exit polls show that 18 to 29 years olds made up 28 percent of the 2012 electorate.  This turnout was vastly different than the Field poll and other analysts anticipated, and it was driven by Proposition 30.”

The higher-than-expected youth vote was a national phenomenon not specific to California. Tony talks about turnout not being what Field anticipated. Nationally, Gallup didn’t have Barack Obama up one single day in the entire last month of its daily tracking poll. Why? It assumed, as did most of us, that the heavy youth turnout of 2008 couldn’t be repeated.

Instead, as The New York Times and others have reported repeatedly over the past year, the Obama camp’s use of behavorial scientists combined with an immense database on tens of millions of voters allowed the campaign to target email and social media pitches to individuals who needed encouragement to make it to the polls.

Sorry, Tony, but you’re just wrong.

More on microtargeting here.

Still more here.

“In politics, the era of big data has arrived.”