Nonvoters, this is your year to be counted
Your television, social media feed and physical mailbox will receive one last batch of assorted pleadings for your vote in the next few hours. Some of those messages might actually contain objectively factual information. Might, but probably won’t.
The California primary takes place Tuesday, in case you’ve just awakened from a coma, and most of us can probably think of good reasons to not bother voting.
Chief among them: Why must I choose between the same two old men? Fair enough. But dissatisfaction runs deep down the ballot.
There’s also this more localized gripe: Why bother to vote if my congressman doesn’t care enough about his district to finish out his term, or at least coordinate a coherent succession strategy? Again, fair enough.
The gap between Democrat and Republican feels wider than ever — so much so that those terms are barely used anymore, outside of official ballot designations. No one is merely a Republican or Democrat during primary season: Even a hyper-MAGA Republican like 20th Congressional District candidate Chris Mathys of Fresno is “dangerously liberal,” and moderate Democrats are routinely portrayed as “left-wing extremists,” even “Communists.” Because, you know, no other kind exists.
Front-runners try to eliminate their most serious primary challengers by warning voters of the “extremist views” of third- or fourthplace rivals, thereby elevating them in the eyes of certain voters and, thus, in the final tabulation. That puts the front-runner in position to more easily win the top two runoff in November. (See Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Adam Schiff’s aggrandizement-by-insult of two-time Trump supporter Steve Garvey, who Schiff would rather face in November than fellow Democrat
Katie Porter; or the Kevin McCarthy-connected PAC that’s supporting 20th Congressional District candidate Vince Fong but is also donating campaign funds to his Democratic rival, Marisa Wood, in the hope that she’ll outpoll Fong’s Republican rival, Mike Boudreaux, in Tuesday’s primary.)
Against this backdrop of cynicism and duplicity, how can reluctant voters expect to be sufficiently inspired to cast ballots? Because disaffected voters are the ones who may well settle this and other elections. Voters tempted to withhold their voices because the effort seems an unnecessary, futile hassle are ultimately the ones with the power to decide the outcome.
As Americans grow more politically polarized by the day, the number of swing voters in play shrinks. Undecided but willing voters are the ones that political campaigns typically fight over until the polls close. But this election season, and possibly for many election seasons to come, the voter who holds the key is the inconsistent voter, the occasional voter, the fatigued or discouraged voter, the voter whose internal debate is not so much between candidates or parties as it is about making the (negligible) effort to choose at all. Rather suddenly, ambivalence dominates.
As Marcela Valdes wrote last week in The New York Times Magazine, elections are decided not only by those who cast votes but also by those who don’t. “President George W. Bush edged out Al Gore in the 2000 election by 537 ballots in Florida,” she writes. “Yet there’s a case to be made that the five million Floridians who were eligible to vote in that election but did not were the ones who really tipped the balance.”
The percentage of Americans who typically opt out of voting approaches half. A study by the University of Florida Election Lab found that in 2020, 44% of those who were eligible to vote did not. That’s in line with turnout over the past century: Between 1920 to 2012, according to political scientists Lyn Ragsdale and Jerrold G. Rusk of Rice University, opt-outs averaged 42%. And, Ragsdale and Rusk say, nonvoters are not strictly politically oblivious. Often, they’re engaged people who simply choose not to vote — informed or semi-informed agnostics.
Trends suggest more and more of them are voting, however. A quarter of the votes cast in 2020 came from people who didn’t vote in 2016, according to Pew Research.
What motivates nonvoters to suddenly become voters? As Ragsdale and Rusk told The Times’ Valdes, the same factors that motivate voters: distinct contrasts between the candidates, and destabilizing events such as war, pandemic or economic recession. All of those factors are in play in 2024 except, at this moment, a pandemic.
If you’re a committed nonvoter entrenched in your ways because you feel your vote doesn’t count or won’t matter, you have never been more wrong. This, perhaps more so than at any time in U.S. history, is your year.