‘Just tapped out’
Many struggling to survive have little room, less opportunity, for voting
Campaign manager Dhrupad Nag and his candidate, Jorge Cabrera, running for state Senate in District 17, keep hitting the same, frustrating wall while making the rounds trying to get out the vote.
Even in this heated election year, people just aren’t into it.
“[ Jorge] says that he talks to a lot of people who are not registered to vote,” said Nag. “Or people who are registered to vote and who are just like ‘We’re just tapped out, we feel very disillusioned by things.’”
The 17th District includes communities like Derby and Ansonia — two working class towns with high levels of poverty in the Lower Naugatuck Valley.
In Derby, 13.2 percent of people live under the federal poverty line. That figure rises to 14.5 percent in Ansonia.
The responses that have frustrated Nag and Cabrera are indicative of a trend that traverses the state. Town by town, city by city, voter
participation in Connecticut rises and falls in proportion to the amount of people living in poverty, aHearst Connecticut Media analysis of state and census data shows.
In the 20 towns and cities with the highest poverty rates, the percentage of active voters — registered residents who have voted in the past four years — was as low as
42 percent and never higher than
61.4 percent, according to recent data.
Those places include Derby and Ansonia (54 percent and 51 percent active voters, respectively), along with Bridgeport and Waterbury (21 percent and 23 percent poverty, 51 percent and 49 percent active voters, respectively).
Hartford takes the top spot for residents living under the federal poverty line at 30 percent (49 percent active voters), followed by New London and New Haven (29 percent and 26 percent poverty, 60 percent and 46 percent active voters, respectively.
In the 20 municipalities with the least poverty, the percentage of active voters was as high as 82.2 percent and not lower than 54.3 percent.
Fairfield County populated the top three spots, with Trumbull, Sherman, and Ridgefield all having less than 2 percent of residents living under the poverty line (74 percent, 73 percent, 75 percent active voters, respectively).
Cities like Stamford and Danbury are high in poverty, with 9.3 and 11.7 percent of people living under the poverty line respectively. In Stamford, 55 percent of voters were active in the last four years. In Danbury, the ratio was 49 percent.
The figures were compiled from voter registration data collected in
2019 by the Secretary of the State’s Office and the Census Bureau’s
2018 American Communities Survey.
Stark differences
The statistical trend is not constant. In Greenwich, where 6 percent of people live below the poverty line, 60 percent of registered voters are active. Norwalk has more residents in poverty, 10 percent, and more active voters, 62 percent.
But when all cities and towns in the state are considered, statistics show that for every one-point increase in the percentage of people living below the poverty line, the percentage of voters decreases by 1.1 points.
In many regions, large voter swings can appear across relatively small spans of geography.
In Derby, where Cabrera is running for the state Senate as a Democrat, and 13 percent live in poverty, 53 percent of registered residents have voted in the last four years.
Only a few miles away in Trumbull, voter participation looks different.
There, 1.8 percent of residents fall under the poverty line — and nearly 74 percent of the registered population has participated in recent elections.
Who votes and why
The trend is not new — nor is it unique to Connecticut. Richer people vote more, according to decades of research in the United States.
Only 48 percent of U.S. families in the lowest income bracket voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to research from EconoFact, a non-partisan digital project at Tufts University. In the highest income category, 86 percent of families voted.
Other factors contribute to the disparity, but they tend to be tied into wealth.
“There’s a couple things that are really good predictors of who is likely to vote. One of the more significant one is education,” said Wesley Renfro, associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Quinnipiac University. “Education is not perfectly overlaid, but strongly overlaid with income.”
The material conditions that tend to surround both low educational attainment and poverty create a web of obstacles that keep people away from the polls come election time.
Poor individuals or those without a higher education are less likely to be salaried, and salaried workers are generally able to take time off from work to go vote, according to Renfro.
Transportation plays a role in voter turnout as well. Families living below the poverty line are less likely to own a car. Without one, getting to the polls becomes more complicated.
“If you are a shift worker for example, if you are somebody who relies on public transportation, it’s actually physically harder and more economically costly to get you to vote,” said Renfro.
Voting rates can also be the product of long-term community socialization and attitudes.
“If you grew up in an area or in a family … [where voting is] just not the norm, or they don’t know how to register, it’s very difficult to kind of figure that out,” said Thomas Hayes, associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut.
Poorer communities also tend to get less attention come election season, creating a circular problem.
Political candidates and campaigns understand that wealthy communities are likelier to vote. That knowledge often fuels who they contact and try to mobilize.
“They know that people are more likely to turn out the more money they have, the wealthier that they are,” said Hayes. “They also know they have access to the voter rolls in the sense that they know who has turned out and who hasn’t in past elections.”
This year
The disparity in voter participation is a larger problem than even the compiled numbers suggest. Not only do registered citizens tend to vote less often if they are poor, fewer living in poverty tend to register in the first place.
The Secretary of the State’s Office has undertaken efforts to broaden registration, and this year through the office the state is trying to mobilize every person on its voter rolls.
Ahead of the 2020 election, the state mailed in September absentee ballot applications to all 2.2 million registered voters in the state.
That effort — in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic — makes voting easier for people across the socioeconomic spectrum, according to UConn’s Hayes, but still isn’t enough.
“That’s a barrier, right? It’s not that everybody who’s an eligible age is getting application to register to vote, it’s that [only] people that are registered to vote are getting this,” he said.
Neither the pandemic nor the uphill battle in mobilizing voters traditionally excluded from elections have discouraged Nag as he works to increase interest in the
17th state Senate District.
Nag was once the political director for the Connecticut Working Families Party, and is used to working both within and without the two-party structure to engage voters of color and low-income people with the political process.
“This year we have expanded the kind of voters that we speak to normally,” he said. “We are focusing more of our efforts and energy in talking to voters … who don’t have as high a propensity to vote, especially in the Valley.”
Without traditional campaign events, Nag is focusing his energy on finding new ways for his candidate to reach out to voters of all backgrounds
“There’s a lot of voters who, for various reasons… they’re just not like typical voters. But if you talk to them, they will come and vote for you,” he said.
“The issue is that people don’t talk to them, ever.”