The biggest problems in the U.S. right now are not Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton, or even Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. Those men are not the problem. Believe it or not, money in politics is not even the problem. Those are all symptoms. The problem is that liberals don’t vote, and we should all be angry.
Sean McElwee of Al Jazeera (why is it that non-American sources are better at American news?) pointed out a few polls that pretty definitively prove that we can have a Democratic majority – in fact, we could have a liberal majority and Democratic Presidents who aren’t afraid of their own liberal shadows- if people would only get off their collective derrières and vote.
Here are the facts: people who don’t vote are for all the right things, generally, at least from our perspective. People who don’t vote want universal healthcare. People who don’t vote want unions. People who don’t vote want more educational opportunities. People who don’t vote want to fix income inequality. And people who don’t vote don’t do a damned thing about it.
“If everybody in this country voted,” the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, “the Democrats would be in for the next 100 years.” There is strong evidence to support his claim. A 2007 study by Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler found that nonvoters are more economically liberal than voters, preferring government health insurance, easier union organizing and more federal spending on schools. Nonvoters preferred Barack Obama to Mitt Romney by 59 percent to 24 percent, while likely voters were split 47 percent for each, according to a 2012 Pew Research Center poll. Nonvoters are far less likely to identify as Republican, and voters tend to be more opposed to redistribution than nonvoters.
In a recent nationwide study, Stockton College professor James Avery found a strong correlation between the electorate’s class bias and the Gini coefficient, a commonly used measure of inequality. In short, the lower the turnout, the higher the class bias and the greater the support for policies that lead to inequality. His study builds on previous research by political scientists Christopher Witko, Nathan Kelly and William Franko showing how class bias in voting reinforces economic inequalities. Their findings are not confined to the U.S. Around the world, voter turnout is correlated with redistributive policies. For example, the turnout of low-income voters has been linked to regressive state tax systems and highersocial spending.
Even liberals who plan on voting are wussy about it. If the weather’s bad, it’s liberals who stay home. That could be one of the reasons Republicans love voter ID laws. They figure that the more roadblocks they can put up toward voting, the fewer liberals will turnout.
Liberals are far more likely to sit out midterm and primary elections, which is why our candidates are never liberal enough. If liberals voted, not only would we vote in more Democrats, Democrats would be more liberal and conservatives would never be able to vote them out.
Now, for all the arguments about term limits, that would be moot if liberals voted. When liberals vote, incumbents’ jobs aren’t so secure.
While Democrats are pretty good with Get Out the Vote campaigns, that’s not enough. Basically, they only work on people who are already motivated and people of higher income brackets.
Here are my suggestions:
- Same day registration
- Internet voting
- Early voting
- Paid time off for voting
