The War For Nonvoters

[modest mouse]

There is often temptation to post articles from The Atlantic but most are too long to be read by anyone who isnt already interested in the topic. I've been reading some of their recent articles tonight and can also suggest their insightful article on Bobby Fischer and his continued lunacy.

The following article stands on its own but is also recognizing a book that looks to be a good read. Consult the website for more information.

The War For Nonvoters
by Jack Beatty

The "party of nonvoters" is 120 million strong. Whoever corrals them will hold the key to future elections

"Politics is who gets what, when, and how..."
~Harold Lasswell

America's largest political party, in Walter Dean Burnham's phrase, is "the party of nonvoters"?120 million strong. Barring a realigning event on the order of the Great Depression, today's "fifty-fifty" tie in American politics can't be broken with current voters. The electorate needs to expand. The first party to mobilize a significant fraction of nonvoters will become the new American majority.

Who belongs to the party of nonvoters? Martin P. Wattenberg's new X-ray of the body politic and its phantom limbs, Where Have All The Voters Gone?, reveals a complex condition.


* The main reason registered nonvoters give for not voting is that they don't have time to get to the polls. Whereas 7.6 percent of respondents to a 1980 Census Bureau survey pled "Too busy; could not take time from work/school," 21 percent did so in 1996.

* Psychologically, nonvoters are "uninterested, uniformed, and uninvolved." They have less education. The United States has the strongest correlation between education and voting among the advanced industrial countries?six times as strong as in Britain, for example. In 1998 U.S. college graduates voted at 36 percent above the national average; those with "some high school" voted at 43 percent below it. In 1966 the figures were +27 and -10.

* Nonvoters experience less "social connectedness" than voters. The falling marriage rate, Wattenberg writes, "is one of the chief demographic causes of turnout decline." In 1998 union households outvoted the general electorate by +26, the same score as voters who "attend religious services regularly." Those who "never attend" religious services scored 53 points lower.

* Nonvoters tend to be less white than voters. Hispanic citizens voted at merely 20 percent of the national average in 1996, a presidential year. While the gap between white and black turnout rates has narrowed in recent years, blacks scored 25 percent below the national average in 1996.

These findings cohere in a portrait of civic disadvantage. Jesse Jackson's evocative characterization of the lives we are talking about retires countless volumes of sociology: "They take the early bus." People with less education tend to have all-consuming jobs. They don't have the time or the energy to follow public affairs, which takes leisure and requires some capacity for disinterested indignation. In the 1960s those with high school or less than high school educations could get well-paying unionized jobs in manufacturing. Unions represented 35 percent of the private-sector workforce. Now they represent 9 percent. And there are fewer manufacturing jobs, especially in urban areas. Less-educated workers experience less solidarity than they did forty years ago and earn much less in dead-end service-economy jobs. Politics is doing nothing to remediate their condition. On the contrary, both parties are in hock to interests that stand to lose from egalitarian policies like national health insurance. The political inequality manifest in election turnout reflects a deeper social and economic inequality.

The controlling truth about the party of nonvoters, however, is age. Old people vote; young people, especially less affluent, less educated young people, don't. So politicians pander to the old and ignore the young. Seniors vote at a rate thirty-one points higher than those under thirty. Whereas 73 percent of seniors follow public affairs "most or some of the time," only 33 percent of young people do. This generation gap in civic participation and interest emerged only recently. In 1960 74 percent of seniors and 84 percent of young people kept up with political campaigns in newspapers; now 56 percent of the former and only 27 percent of the latter do. In 1964 the young scored 5 points higher than seniors in a test of political knowledge; now they can answer only one of three questions whereas seniors answer half of them correctly. Wattenberg sorts through various reasons for the gap, but one study of young people in the last presidential election says the essential: "Neglection 2000."

If politics is "who gets what," then it's rational for young people to stay home on election day. "Major issues that affect young people are not even making it onto the public agenda," Wattenberg concludes. Sixty-two percent said that politicians pay "too little" attention to the issues relevant to their generation and 21 percent said "the right amount." The figures for seniors were 33 percent and 41 percent. Al Gore's "lockbox" campaign was geared to capturing seniors in Pennsylvania and Florida. He narrowly won Pennsylvania, but Bush carried Florida's seniors, 51-47, while losing young voters by 55-40. Exit poll information for this year's election is still scanty, but USA Today reports that the GOP carried seniors?despite constant Democratic attacks on Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, featuring ads showing Bush pushing a wheelchair-bound senior down a flight of stairs. Much of Democratic electioneering is an attempt to frighten seniors, and it is not working.

Meanwhile, with his "personal accounts" plan, Bush has found an issue that has the potential to break the 50-50 tie. Polls show that young people strongly support the idea of diverting a portion of Social Security taxes into private investments. As public policy, privatization is a fraud. It will leave a trillion dollar hole in the Social Security Trust Fund just when it needs a surplus. And, by the most generous analysis, it will give today's young people a smaller monthly check when they retire than what they'd get under current law. Fair-minded readers of the Brookings Institution's sixty-page analysis of Bush's proposal can come to no other conclusion. But "personal accounts" are about politics not policy. Bush won the presidency despite touching the "Third Rail" of American politics?Social Security privatization. His congressional party, in elections in which Democrats made privatization an issue, carried seniors. So there is little political risk for Bush in pressing ahead with personal accounts. He has found an issue that could turn the politics of generations against the Democrats. It won't be easy. Young voters are more liberal than the GOP on social issues and government spending on education, health care, and the environment. But the opening is there.

The Democrats had better get into the bidding war. That terminology will offend some readers. But as we see the Republicans paying off their financial backers in the 2002 election?first big pharmaceuticals, then big energy?we can be under no illusion about what politics is. Who gets what from whom describes reality.

A good place for the Democrats to start is The Stakeholder Society , a 1999 book recommending a new homestead act for young people. At twenty-one, every American would receive a substantial grant, to be used to pay for higher education, as a down payment for a house, or to start a business?but otherwise kept in the bank or stock market for a lifetime. Yes, they would have to pay it back, with interest, but they'd come out way ahead. Today's young people would retire as the richest generation in history. Parties win supporters by delivering for them. Thus far, only one party is competing for the favor of young Americans. The 2002 election should have taught the Democrats that you can't beat something with nothing.

 

[seXieleXie]

i love the atlantic. my roommate subscribes to it and then leaves it in the bathroom.


maybe that was oversharing. anyway, i don't have anything to add, but this is an interesting article. thanks for posting it señor mouse.

 

[modest mouse]

I'm in desperate need of magazine dropping roomates. I've considered subscribing but havnt yet done so. Their website is eminently readable but many articles are held back to only the magazine.

 

[RastaPope]

I'm white. Fairly educated, middle class child of upper-middle class parents.

I don't vote. Not because I don't have the time, mostly because I don't care, and I see the futility in voting in anything beyond simple, townwide elections. Those are the only things that make a real actual difference as far as I can tell.

 

[modest mouse]

I don't vote. Not because I don't have the time, mostly because I don't care, and I see the futility in voting in anything beyond simple, townwide elections. Those are the only things that make a real actual difference as far as I can tell.

And herein lies the problem. The same system that establishes the facade of two different parties that fosters the ambivalence is perpetuated by not voting.

 

[RastaPope]

And herein lies the problem. The same system that establishes the facade of two different parties that fosters the ambivalence is perpetuated by not voting.

That too. The R's and D's, when you strip away all the pretty paint, are the same fucking thing. All the rest is window dressing.

 

[seXieleXie]

I'm in desperate need of magazine dropping roomates. I've considered subscribing but havnt yet done so. Their website is eminently readable but many articles are held back to only the magazine.

she does the same thing with newsweek. it's great. last year i didn't know much about what was going on in the world because i didn't have a newspaper subscription and didn't have a tv. now i have both of those things plus two informative magazines and i can actually have a conversation about current events without feeling like a cavewoman.

 

[teddybear4play]

I liked it up until the last three paragraphs.

TB4p

 

[HeavyStick]

I liked it up until the last three paragraphs.

TB4p

That makes one of you.

 

[modest mouse]

I liked it up until the last three paragraphs.

Thats a rather concise and correct summation contained in those last three paragraphs. Its not party-spin but an assesment.

BTW, your sig is totally out of control.

 

[Byron In Exile]

That too. The R's and D's, when you strip away all the pretty paint, are the same fucking thing. All the rest is window dressing.

And what the R's and D's want most of all is for people like you to stay away from the polling places on election day.

 

[concrete]

M.M

thank you...CHESS player
never play Queens gambit again..just educational...thanks

 

[teddybear4play]

Thats a rather concise and correct summation contained in those last three paragraphs. Its not party-spin but an assesment.

Sure sounded a lot like party spin to me:

"As public policy, privatization is a fraud."

"The Democrats had better get into the bidding war."

"[A]s we see the Republicans paying off their financial backers in the 2002 election — first big pharmaceuticals, then big energy . . ."

"A good place for the Democrats to start is The Stakeholder Society, a 1999 book recommending . . ."

BTW, your sig is totally out of control.

Thanks. I like it, too.

TB4p

 

[RastaPope]

And what the R's and D's want most of all is for people like you to stay away from the polling places on election day.

But hey, I'm in every demographic that they take care of. No worries.

 

[Lost Cause]

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.....

"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got."

www.lp.org