American voters are projected to turn out at the polls next year in numbers not seen in a century or more in U.S. politics, experts predict, sending both major political parties into overdrive as they seek to win voter support and get them to fill out a ballot.

Turnout in 2018 was the highest it had been for a midterm election since 1914, says University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald, a nationally recognized elections expert who maintains the voter data site United States Election Project. Next year, he predicts, 65%-66% of eligible voters will turn out, the highest since 1908, when turnout was 65.7%. The GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies as well as the progressive voter data group Catalyst are also projecting record or near-record turnout.

And it's not about policy proposals, lofty speeches or tantalizing promises. As political operatives and activists gear up for another heated election season, the mission is all about getting to the "low-propensity voter" – the person who is eligible to vote but for some reason has never or rarely cast a ballot. A successful effort could not only raise voter participation closer to the levels of other developed democracies but could ensure a broader and more diverse swath of the nation has a say in who will lead the country.

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"If you look at the political parties, they [engage in] tactics aimed at the high-propensity voter," since it's cheaper to court the votes of people who have already demonstrated a willingness and ability to participate," says Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for the nonpartisan group Vote.org.

That leads to a "total self-fulfilling prophecy" that disenfranchises parts of the American electorate, Guthrie says. A low-propensity voter, for example, may sit out an election in the belief that politicians don't care anyway. In turn, that politician or candidate won't bother spending much time on those unreliable voters, since the investment of time and money might not produce gains at the ballot box.

But with the last presidential election decided by a relatively paltry 79,646 votes in three states, operatives are widening their nets.

For Republicans, that means convincing disaffected, generally rural residents who eschewed voting because they didn't think politicians listen to them or would address their concerns. For Democrats, it means reaching younger Americans and racial and ethnic minorities who are either not in the habit of voting or find it difficult from a practical perspective – either because they don't have the required ID or can't get time off from work or school during polling hours.

Campaigns tend to go with the "four-of-four" demographic – people who voted in four of the last four elections, says Matt Braynard, executive director of Look Ahead America, a group dedicated to increasing voter participation among what Braynard describes as "disaffected patriotic Americans." The group is not associated with a political party, but Braynard worked for President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign until April 2016 and authored a strategy memo on how to engage low-propensity voters.

Those voters, who are considered key to Trump's unexpected win in 2016, are mostly rural or from post-industrial areas, Braynard says. "Democrats are hoping they'll (older voters) die off, and Republicans pay them lip service but constantly undercut them," Braynard laments. But that voter demographic – such as the worker whose job has gone overseas or is threatened, Braynard says, by an "open border" policy – is necessary to ensure a Trump re-election.

There's little point in trying to persuade people, especially in this politically polarized environment, Braynard says. "It doesn't work." Trump, Braynard says his own research shows, did best among those who initially said they were least likely to vote in the 2016 election – and the GOP will need them again next year.

Democrats, meanwhile, are eyeing another opportunity: votes from the "emerging American electorate," younger and minority voters who comprise an increasing chunk of the electorate but didn't turn out in high enough numbers in 2016 to elect Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Activists are starting early this cycle with voter registration efforts – not only in states Democrats almost certainly need to get back in 2020 for an Electoral College win (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) but in states with substantial Latino or African American populations, such as Arizona, Georgia, Florida and Texas. Texas is not considered a battleground state now but has been moving toward that status, largely because of increased urbanization.

Registration does not always translate into a vote at the ballot box, but it's a critical indicator in the U.S. Less than 56% of voting-age Americans turned out to vote in 2016, putting the nation 26th among 35 industrialized democracies, a 2018 Pew Research Center study reported. But the study also found that nearly 87% of registered voters cast a ballot that year, indicating that getting eligible voters registered is a key hurdle.

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Other hurdles to registration and voting remain, however, in some states that have passed laws making it harder to register people to vote or which have reduced polling places. Some of those efforts are being challenged in the courts. A federal judge this week, for example, stayed a Tennessee law that requires, among other things, that people registering 100 or more voters take a state training course. The same statute makes it a crime for those registering voters to fail to turn in completed form within 10 days.

"There was a combination of onerous and unnecessary burden put on third parties who were simply trying to help register people to vote," says Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Other states are on a mission to "purge" people officials suspect may be wrongly included on voter rolls. In Texas, for example, the state said it would look at driver's license lists and remove anyone not identified as a citizen. The problem, Rosenberg says, is that driver's licenses are good for six years, and 20,000 Texans become citizens each year – meaning 100,000-120,000 people could be wrongly removed from voter rolls because of outdated information.

Meanwhile, states like Oregon, which has automatic voter registration when people interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles and a vote-by-mail system, make it nearly painless for people to register and vote.

"We're moving toward a situation where it's going to be much easier to register and cast a ballot in Oregon than it is in Alabama," says David Daley, senior fellow at FairVote, a nonpartisan elections reform group. Since states that make it easier to vote tend to be blue and states with onerous rules red, "it perpetuates polarization," Daley says. "It turns part of the country into democracy deserts."

And despite the projected big showing at the polls next year, political operatives aren't counting on anything. A poll of battleground states by the Democratic-leaning group Priorities USA, for example, found Trump losing 48-40 against a generic Democratic presidential nominee, and the still-to-be-selected Democrat capturing 278 Electoral College votes to Trump's 259, with one elector (in Nebraska, which award electors proportionally) a toss-up. But "the margins in the states are very small," Priorities USA Chairman Guy Cecil says. "We are one state away from the reverse being true."