In a state where one party dominates as much as the Democrats do in Hawaii, the next 67 days of campaigning leading up to the primary will decide just about everything.
Political observers say the collapse of the Hawaii Republican Party and changes in the structure of elections in Hawaii have made the Aug. 11 primary election increasingly important even as voter participation in primaries has continued to decline.
Tuesday was the deadline for almost all candidates to file to run for office, and the Democrats have such an overwhelming advantage here that the Republicans could not even manage to field candidates in 33 of 51 state House seats.
The GOP was also unable to put up candidates for eight of 12 state Senate seats by the Tuesday filing deadline. The deadline for a 13th Senate seat has been extended until June 22.
Fifteen Democrats in the House and one in the Senate have no opposition this year, including House Speaker Scott Saiki (D, Downtown-Kakaako-McCully), House Finance
Committee Chairwoman
Sylvia Luke (D, Punchbowl-Pauoa-Nuuanu) and House Majority Leader Della Au
Belatti (D, Moiliili-Makiki-Tantalus).
All of that speaks to what longtime political columnist Dan Boylan describes as “the death of the Republican Party,” which has reshaped Hawaii elections.
“Our primaries are our elections because it’s the Democrat who’s going to win,” said Boylan. Certainly there are exceptions to that rule, but today there are no Republicans left in the 25-member state Senate and only five left in the 51-member House.
The governor, lieutenant governor and the four-member Hawaii delegation to Congress are also all Democrats.
The number of people participating in Hawaii primary elections has been generally declining over the past 20 years, and dropped to less than 35 percent in 2016. But it is no secret who does usually participate in Democratic primaries.
“In this state we know there’s an ethnic identification,” said Boylan. “If you are a Japanese-American, you are very likely to be a Democrat. If you’re a union member or a Filipino, you’re very likely to be a Democrat.” Older voters are also more likely to turn out for any election than the general population, he said.
Business people are far more likely to be Republicans, “and the Republicans may very well say, ‘It doesn’t make a difference, we’re not going to win anyway.’ So, you don’t vote,” Boylan said.
All of that adds up to a shrinking pool of participating Democratic primary voters who will have an outsize influence over the 2018 elections, and there is only limited time now to reach those voters.
Hawaii in 2012 moved its primary elections from September to the second Saturday in August, and moving up the primary election forces the campaigns to organize and mobilize earlier, said Charles Toguchi, a former state senator who is volunteering on Gov. David Ige’s re-election campaign.
“Just about every election, a lot of voters don’t vote in the primary, they show up for the general election, but for us the race is in the primary, so we definitely have some initiatives that we’re going to be implementing to get out the vote,” he said. Ige is being challenged in the primary by U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa.
The primary schedule is further compressed by absentee voting. Nearly 62 percent of the people who voted in the 2016 primary election used absentee mail-in ballots or were absentee walk-in voters, and Toguchi is expecting a similar number of absentee voters this year.
Absentee ballots are distributed 20 days before Election Day, which means the effort to turn out supporters to vote has to “peak” twice in the run-up to Election Day — once for the absentee balloting that begins in July, and once for the regular voting on Aug. 11, Toguchi said.
“We just have to maintain the momentum going into the election on the 11th,” he said.
