The Democrats’ midterm drop off problem is as well understood as it is intractable. For a number of reasons, young adults and minorities are less likely to vote in midterm elections than in general elections, and since young people and minorities vote disproportionately for Democrats, while old people vote disproportionately for Republicans, Democrats perform significantly worse in midterms than in general elections.

Cook Political Report

To stem or reverse that problem, Democrats need to identify the drop off voters and figure out how to get them to show up at the polls every two years as opposed to every four. As Sasha Issenberg recently wrote in the pages of this magazine, “the midterm imperative is clear: Raise the dollars and secure the volunteer commitments. Then go and turn out those who are already on your side but won’t show up without a friendly nudge.”

But it’s not quite as straightforward as making unreliable voters more reliable. For every unit of energy and resources Democrats devote to reduce the difference between their midterm and general electorates, Republicans are responding—not with turnout-boosting strategies of their own, but by making it harder for the pool of voters who make up that difference to vote, even if they want to. In a way, the story of the 2014 elections can be boiled down to two counterposed strategies, with Democrats on one side trying to mitigate their midterm drop off and Republicans on the other trying to exacerbate it. In 2012, Republican efforts to suppress Democratic turnout may have backfired. The Republican response was not to scale back those efforts but to make them more impervious to blowback.

No two stories heighten the contrast between strategies than this Washington Post article about Senator Mark Begich’s unrivaled ground game in Alaska—the most difficult state in the country to canvas—and this News & Observer article about the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, which ran afoul of the North Carolina election board by sending hundreds of thousands of erroneous voter registration forms to residents (and at least one cat) around the state.