Half of Americans Don't Vote. What Are They Thinking?

[kpete]

Inside the largest ever survey of the politically disengaged.

“There’s a lot of conventional wisdom as to why somebody would not vote, but nobody has really gone to these citizens and asked them why they don’t vote,” says Sam Gill, chief program officer at the Knight Foundation, which decided to undertake the study last winter. “It’s the story of this huge portion of the population that consistently sits this out.”


In the broadest terms, the study found the average chronic nonvoter is a married, nonreligious white woman between 56 and 73 who works full time but makes less than $50,000 a year. She is most likely to identify as a moderate, lean toward the Democratic Party, get her news from television and to have a very unfavorable impression of both political parties and President Donald Trump. She has a 77 percent chance of being registered to vote and says she doesn’t because she doesn’t like the candidates but claims to be certain she will vote in November. But the study’s real lesson is that averages are deceiving, concealing more than they reveal.

Nonvoters are an eclectic faction with distinctive blocs that support Democrats and Republicans—but don’t show up to cast their ballots—and an even larger group that is alienated from a political system it finds bewildering, corrupt, irrelevant or some combination thereof. These blocs are so large that when a campaign is able to motivate even a portion of one, it can swing an election, which may have been what allowed Trump to bust through the “blue wall” in the Great Lakes region in 2016 and Barack Obama to flip North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and Indiana in 2008. What these blocs do in November could well decide the 2020 presidential election.

Long article:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/19/knight-nonvoter-study-decoding-2020-election-wild-card-115796

[beachbumbob]

1. goes back to apathy and the fact too many do not feel voting even matters, which of

course is exactly what the putin/gop/trump people have echoes for decades to create the apathy. Conservatives win as a minority because their base does vote, Democrats lose for the opposite reason of not voting.

[Jamastiene]

2. After hearing about how Russia is rigging our elections and

seeing how Republicans now openly break the law to steal elections too, I doubt they are going to get all excited to START voting. Too bad. They could help break that trend.

[kacekwl]

5. Exactly the reason TO vote.

How can they not see that ?

[SmartVoter22]

3. Tuesday is a bad voting day.

People are working on tuesdays. So they have just a few hours to get to polls. They may also have kids to make dinner, homework and laundry, etc.

Every Dem campaign should be promoting Vote At Home, in their states. This gives every voter, and the non-voters an opportunity to vote with a mailed ballot. This gives them a few weeks to research the actual ballot and then vote, when it's convenient for them. Of course, most states will let you register to vote and ask for a mailed ballot at the same time.

Most states no longer require some medical excuse or other reason to vote by absentee ballot.

[58Sunliner]

4. Why the discrepancy?Where did the writer get a different conclusion?

Last edited Sat Feb 22, 2020, 02:19 PM - Edit history (1)

"Compared to active voters, non-voters are more likely to be less educated, lower income, non-white and unmarried." https://the100million.org/

https://knightfoundation.org/reports/the-100-million-project/

Established Progressives
21% of non-voters
Compared to other non-voters, they are well established both in life and in their left-leaning political beliefs.

Traditional Conservatives
17% of non-voters
Compared to other non-voters, they hold the most conservative political beliefs and are more likely to be enjoying a comfortable retirement.

Modern Moderates
20% of non-voters
Compared to other non-voters, they are left-leaning moderates working hard as they approach middle age.

Indifferent Average
17% of non-voters
Compared to other non-voters, they appear very middle-of-the-road in their politics, engagement and situation in life.

Unattached Apoliticals
17% of non-voters
Compared to other non-voters, they are young and staunchly independent, both politically and in life.

Underemployed Unsures
8.4% of non-voters
Compared to other non-voters, they are the least resourced and engaged across the board, and unsure of where they stand on politics.

They are only counting 25 and over-"defined as eligible adults 25 or older".

[marlakay]

18. I've met the bottom 3 going door to door

Some say they are all the same why bother or I don’t pay attention to any of that.

If you ask them about a certain issue they say congress doesn’t do anything either party.

Or they look at you like you are a mormon or JW knocking on their door.

[Ohiogal]

6. Wow, this is a great analysis.

“These are people who are generally below the poverty line, with a lot of job turnover and family disruption, whose lives are busy living paycheck to paycheck,” he says. “You don’t really have a lot of time to watch the news or to vote, and the paperwork necessary to vote is annoying.”

“It’s justified cynicism,” he says, an entirely rational distrust of participating. “When they have engaged with the system, it kind of screwed them over. You go to the DMV to get your driver’s license and you find out you have an old speeding ticket you can’t pay. You get hurt and go to the hospital and you get a really big bill. You vote and your name will be in a file somewhere and you’re called up for jury duty. Every interaction brings hardship.”

*****

I have long felt that, life for the low or middle income person in America, is increasingly complicated,stressful, and unaffordable. No wonder so many of this demographic is alienated from “ the system”.

[PatSeg]

7. I'm not sure I'd want some of the non-voters

to vote. Many that I know don't have a clue what is happening in the world. An uninformed voter is not necessarily a good thing.

[PatSeg]

8. I would just add

that a lot of Trump supporters were non-voters before 2016.

[randr]

11. I'm not so sure the people who do vote

are any more informed

[PatSeg]

13. That is true

Basically, my problem is with uninformed people making decisions that affect the rest of us. I think that is what happened in 2016. I think a lot of previously nonpolitical people got on the Trump band wagon.

Republicans have been going after votes from uninvolved people for decades. That is often the only way they could win elections.

[LiberalArkie]

9. Usually that the American wealthy, the power people, the nations congress critters the are supposed

to represent everyone only care about their own wealth increasing. For them it never seems to change whoever is in office.

[randr]

10. If the other half voted chaos would ensue

We are barely prepared to count the vote that shows up. Try to imagine twice as many people and problems.
We need a way to vote and tally the results that is as trusted and accurate as the way we spend and account for money.
If we can keep track of all the money spent in billions of transactions using a myriad of methods each and every day we can surely figure out how to count a few hundred million votes every few years.
The fact that we don't, not can't, gives rise to suspicion that the powers that be do not want a trusted or accurate system.

[Tien1985]

12. I think this needs to be a priority conversation.

As the article points out, we often assume non voters will vote for us, but that isn't necessarily the case.

When people say their vote doesn't matter, why are people assuming it means that both parties are the same? Why not, "my daily life will not be greatly changed by voting." I can work with that and change people's minds when we have that conversation. I'm tired of trying to undo the damage caused by people who have been told that if the didn't vote they deserve whatever they get, that they shouldn't have anything to say, or that they are "low-information" (which, by the way, gets read as being called stupid), or that not voting at all means voting Red.

I work daily with people in this category, helping to meet basic needs. I use every opportunity I can to help people get access to vote and let them know what their options are. Some are registered Democrats but are disenfranchised by policies that their own people put up. Some are registered Independents and that identity is important to them, talking crap about it just ticks them off. Some aren't registered because there are a bunch of systemic roadblocks to participating in our system. I can usually fix that last part easily, but when someone feels like the politicians don't care about those roadblocks, they don't care much to have me help them with it.

We can win more voters to our side but assuming that every non vote was a Blue vote that someone was just to stupid or stubborn to make is a mistake.

[Uncle Joe]

14. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread kpete.

[PETRUS]

19. This passage jumped out at me:

"She is most likely to identify as a moderate, lean toward the Democratic Party, get her news from television and to have a very unfavorable impression of both political parties and President Donald Trump."

I totally understand why so many people on DU are offended by Sanders saying he's "taking on the Democratic establishment," but I think that's a message that appeals to a certain segment of potential voters - maybe even a large segment.

[Peacetrain]

15. Informative...thank you!!!

[Garrett78]

16. I think this is crucial:

Nonvoters are an eclectic faction with distinctive blocs that support Democrats and Republicans—but don’t show up to cast their ballots—and an even larger group that is alienated from a political system it finds bewildering, corrupt, irrelevant or some combination thereof.

And some nonvoters are more likely than others to engage:

Like other scholars, their research identified a substantial cohort of would-be Democratic voters who rarely participate in the political process. These “passive liberals” are weakly engaged but progressive on most issues when they are, isolated from “the system” and fatalistic about how it will affect their lives, and far more likely to be African American and to feel the world is becoming more dangerous. They constitute 15 percent of the voting age population.

“They’re younger, more urban, more female, more black and Hispanic on average and have a clear orientation toward the Democratic Party,” says Stephen Hawkins, More in Common's director of research. “But they feel disaffected and cynical toward the system so they are less inclined to vote as a whole.”

This group closely mirrors one of two camps that Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, has called the “other swing voters,” the ones who chose not between voting for the Democrats or the Republicans but rather between Democrat and not voting at all....These “passive liberals” stand in stark contrast to a larger mass of nonvoters who are far more profoundly disengaged from and disinterested in politics.

[redqueen]

17. That when the chips are down both parties work together and not in ways that help us.

Iraq war
Telecom Act
Workfare

I could go on but it's fucking tiring

People do not see little dribs and drabs of progress and think it's anything to get excited about. We get a little bit of help here and there, but overall we're getting fucked and nobody seems all that bothered about it. We are so far behind the rest of the developed world in so many ways. So yeah I understand not voting.