Campaign For Nonvoters

 

GDP growth January 2019 to January 2022

Commenter Cheez wrote in re Saturday's post:

That "majority" must be based on the third of eligible voters who so far can't be bothered. Is there any evidence that these groundhogs can be relied on to choose uncomfortable reality over a snug and cosy fantasy? I wonder how much is known about these people, what they care about, what sort of threat would finally make them pay attention to their civic duty, as voting (and serving on a jury) used to be referred to as.

And a majority can be ignored if they do not contest being ignored. It's going to take an existential threat to get people's attention. For the Democratic Party, it should be the outright theft of a presidential election: 2000 didn't do it but Republicans had a veneer of sanity then. It's going to take some unholy blend of Gilead and Idiocracy to get apathetic non-voters to ask "wha happened?" .

My response:

choose uncomfortable reality over a snug and cosy fantasy?

I don't think you can build a bigger majority than we had in 2018 on fear of dictatorship, if that's what you mean. We did do pretty well out of sheer negative partisanship in 2020--more people thinking Republicans are bad than thinking Democrats are bad--but that was a presidential year, with Trump personally embodying the bad. The majority I have in mind is the one that favors minimum wage hikes, family leave and subsidized day care, electric cars, and taxing the rich.

It is my opinion, and will remain so unless and until I see some serious evidence, that the major cause of nonvoting is not laziness but an understandable cynicism: an inability to see that voting makes much of a difference. "Politicians never keep their promises." "They're all the same." They don't know Democrats plan to do these things or, if they do, don't expect them to succeed.

Meanwhile, on the fear of Republicans side, most people don't expect they or their partner is going to need an abortion, or face an outrageous medical bill. (One out of three of the nice suburban moms who just voted Glenn Youngkin into the governorship of Virginia has probably had an abortion, of course, but the McAuliffe campaign did a terrible job of trying to reach them.) Still less do they imagine being stopped from reading a book they want to read, or think of the nice guy who delivers their pizza as somebody who could be ripped away from his family and deported to Honduras at any moment. No white person expects to be shot dead by a cop. Tyranny isn't that hard for most people to bear, as long as the economy doesn't turn sour and a pandemic doesn't arrive.

I'm afraid the focus on January 6 is going to end up the same way as all the other House-run Trump-catching process, with a story most people can't follow clearly enough to understand what he's supposed to have done wrong. I have more faith in the investigations of his finances, because everybody understands that kind of crime. But in the best case, if he's really busted so hard he can't run for president any more, that just gives Republicans a chance to detach themselves from him this November, like Cruz and Rubio, who have become outrageously Trumpy in their stupid rhetoric but never mention Trump.

I don't even know what I'm saying, except I really wish part of this campaign could be positive, focused on the remarkable things Democrats have managed to do—with a critique of the former team, obviously, introducing it, from 200 Infrastructure Weeks to one infrastructure bill; from a healthcare plan that was always two weeks away to a huge healthcare improvement in 12 executive orders and the provisions in the American Rescue Plan that passed without anybody noticing them in the first 100 days, from telling everybody the novel coronavirus was going to disappear and it was all China's fault anyway to doing something about it, rolling out the vaccine, from gigs and crap wages to jobs in such quantities that you could pick and choose, from years of stagnation followed by economic collapse to an actual boom (accompanied by, yes, some inflation)

and whatever co-presidents Manchin and Sinema allow us to have in the next six months, or once Senator Lujan gets out of stroke rehabilitation, like from Jeff Bezos paying less in taxes than you and me to Jeff Bezos paying a little more in taxes than you and me...

I'd like the campaign message to be: Sure, some politicians will do nothing but try to kill you, as we've seen in recent years, but some will get valuable things done, and in America we call them Democrats. Why wouldn't some significant fraction of those non-college nonvoters keep emerging as they began to do in 2018 and continued doing in 2020?

• Biden improved over Clinton among White non-college voters. White voters without a college degree were critical to Trump’s victory in 2016, when he won the group by 64% to 28%. In 2018, Democrats were able to gain some ground with these voters, earning 36% of the White, non-college vote to Republicans’ 61%. In 2020, Biden roughly maintained Democrats’ 2018 share among the group, improving upon Clinton’s 2016 performance by receiving the votes of 33%. But Trump’s share of the vote among this group – who represented 42% of the total electorate this year – was nearly identical to his vote share in 2016 (65%).

(Note they're more helpful in off-years than presidential years, because in off-years only the smart ones come out.) If you actually got a job, you know, if you actually got health insurance, if you received the unemployment supplement, if your kids were among those lifted out of poverty, while the Rescue Plan lasted?