Non-Voters: the Dog that Didn’t Bark

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Three pieces in Sunday’s New York Times paint a dismal picture of our age. A front-page story lauds the huge voter turnout in the presidential election. Nearly 160 million Americans cast their votes. That’s the largest number ever and the highest percentage of eligible voters since 1900, before women got the vote.

But the same story also notes a strong counter-current. Republicans pushed and are still pushing to suppress votes and dilute their impact by gerrymandering and other dirty tricks.

Two other stories paint a much darker picture. A “White House Memo” by crack reporter Peter Baker portrays Trump as a deranged and failing tyrant in the mold of Macbeth, whose Shakespearean agony is yet to come. A third story cites statistics showing that Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, are losing the working class, i.e., non-college educated voters. Headlined “Joe from Scranton Didn’t Win Back the Working Class,” it reports:

“Of the 265 counties most dominated by blue-collar workers—areas where at least 40 percent of employed adults have jobs in construction, the service industry or other nonprofessional fields—Mr. Biden won just 15[.]”

It concludes that winning Congress and the presidency may get increasingly hard for Dems, and that a tectonic shift in workers’ political allegiance may be under way.

Together these stories justify a double dose of Zoloft. If an increasingly deranged president lost re-election only by virtue of workers’ allegiance to Democrats, and if that allegiance is shifting not just due to outrageous lies and propaganda, but to real demographic shifts, what chance does American democracy have?

Yet sometimes it pays to keep your eye on the ball. For quants, that means paying attention to the biggest number.

As the first story reports, the number of certified Biden votes exceeded votes for Trump by seven million. Maybe there’s reason to believe that number might be dropping. But there’s a much, much bigger number that nobody seems to be talking about. It’s the number of eligible people who didn’t vote at all.

The Times lead story happily reports that the recent turnout was an “eye-opening 66.7% of the voting-eligible population[.]” But that’s just two-thirds.

Let that sink in. In an existential election that drew nearly 160 million voters, one out of three simply didn’t bother to show up. That’s about 80 million people, well over eleven times the winning margin.

Isn’t that, and not some presumed and subtle shift in workers’ sentiment, the dog that didn’t bark?

What pollsters and poli-sci buffs ought to be laser-focused on is who those people are and why they didn’t vote. For they—not MAGA-hat wearers—are the key to America’s electoral future. Just imagine what might happen if the US had the same voter turnout as Australia, whose mandate for voting attracts turnouts over 90%.

I have my own hypotheses. Maybe educated people vote because they’ve been taught to believe in democracy and its power for change. Maybe Trump’s supporters vote because he, like Mussolini, has reduced a complex and confusing world to a simple formula. In effect, he says, “Vote for me. I’ve got your back. I’m smart and powerful, and only I can fix it.” And he’s such a riveting attention grabber that voters, trained by video media like Pavlov’s dogs, believe.

But what about the one-third who didn’t vote at all? Maybe they’re not well educated. Maybe they’re mostly poor or near-poor. Maybe they belong to groups on the margins of society, those who never saw (or trusted) a pol who claimed to have their backs. (Maybe some, like an acquaintance of my wife, are wealthy and just don’t bother. But how many are they?)

There are many reasons why workers might not vote. They might think the elite have stacked the deck against them—a proposition for which there is considerable cold evidence. But they might have rejected Trump, too, because (pick one): (1) he’s a miserable excuse for a human being; (2) he’s self-obsessed and doesn’t make much sense; (3) he’s out of touch with reality; (4) no one who brags as much as he does is credible; (5) he’s a plutocrat himself, or at least he brags he is; and/or (6) if he really had workers’ backs, he would have passed a huge infrastructure bill, not a huge tax cut, in his first six months in office.

These voters might not read or watch the news much. They’re probably not big on social media, where 10% of users produce 90% of the political smokescreen, including made-up conspiracies. They’re just trying to survive in a world that seems rigged against them—to make a living, raise a family, and get by with part-time work and maybe two or three jobs.

How do you reach these non-voters? You reach them the old-fashioned way, through persistent, direct personal contact. You reach them through friends and neighbors, people they know, people whom they trust. You reach them with retail politics, not by spending millions on media ads they may never see, or that they may have the good sense to reject just like commercial ads for defective products they can’t afford.

In short, you reach forgotten non-voters through on-the-ground “organizing” groups like Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action.

I know, I know. There are a lot of other groups doing good work on the Abrams model. A recent New York Times article covered some of them, all but complaining about Abrams’ star power.

But Abrams herself is far from a spotlight grabber. She’s the antithesis of Trump. If she’s gotten notice it’s not because she seeks it, but because she’s been the first to achieve real results. After losing the Georgia governorship to vote-suppressor (now governor) Brian Kemp, she helped flip Georgia in the presidential race, for the first time since 1992, and for the first time for a non-Southern candidate since JFK in 1960.

To me, that’s proof of concept enough. The way for Dems to win is not to fight over the scraps of voters so brain-dead that they remained undecided in the most cataclysmic political Armageddon since our Civil War. It’s to motivate a good chunk of the one-third of all citizens who didn’t even bother to show up. It’s to reach citizens who’ve given up—just as did Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden this year—but more systematically, forcefully and deliberately.

The big question that no one has answered so far is simple but profound: Does money or organizing win elections? To me, the Georgia runoffs are a simple test of concept. This year’s presidential race was ambiguous on this point because Dems, motivated by existential fear, managed to outraise the GOP by considerable margins. So it’s possible to conclude that spending hundreds of millions on vast media extravaganzas, while ignoring the ignored, actually worked, even though it didn’t work so well for down-ballot races.

But Georgia’s runoffs are different. Stacey Abrams, her group and others have been working there quietly and efficiently for over two years. That’s a microsecond in politics. But at the presidential level they flipped the state that, since Sherman’s march to the sea, has been the focus of Southern regional resentment for a century and a half.

In my view, if Democrats Ossoff and Warnock win Georgia’s runoffs, it won’t be because of incessant, expensive and clever media ads motivated that Dems’ “base.” It’ll be because Abrams and similar organizers got a big chuck of the forgotten to wake up and vote.

A victory for Warnock and/or Ossoff will help prove that patient, quietly effective door-to-door organizing works. It will reveal neighbor-to-neighbor cooperation as more vital than overpaid political manipulators.

Even if Ossoff and/or Warnock lose, I won’t despair. Nor will a loss refute this hypothesis. The reason: the pandemic has set back door-to-door organizing for almost an entire year. It has made 2020’s road to neighbors’ doors muddy and hazardous.

Now vaccines are on the way. The pandemic will recede. Stacey Abrams and those like her are forces of nature. They will persist. They will persevere, and eventually they will prevail. They will get forgotten citizens registered and to the polls.

That’s my belief, and I’m sticking with it. From now on, my money’s on the organizers, not the overpaid “operatives.”

Those of us who still love Obama know he started out organizing, too. He knew that voting is an act of trust, both in the system and in those you vote for.

Trust isn’t something commandeered, willy-nilly, by massive impersonal propaganda media like Fox and Facebook. The Soviets tried that tack and eventually failed, because trust is a gift of one human being to another. If American democracy is to survive, its future lies in people who believe that and put their belief into action.

Endnote: The Organizers. In citing Stacey Abrams by name, I don’t mean to ignore or belittle others. Despite keeping a low profile, she’s a national symbol and a standout leader of her group, Fair Fight Action.

But there are others. There’s Beto O’Rourke in Texas, who reportedly visited every one of Texas’ 254 counties in his pickup truck in his unsuccessful 2018 campaign for the Senate. Other Georgia organizations include: Helen Butler’s Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda, Georgia Stand Up, and the New Georgia Project (led by Stacy Abrams’ protege Nse Ufot). Non-Georgia-focused organizations include: Black Voters Matter, Democracy for America, The People Campaign (Texas), Progressive Turnout Project, and Voter Protection. (It might be helpful if there were a national umbrella organization to keep records and a list, and so to funnel contributions from people like me who want to support these groups but aren’t in the daily maelstrom.)

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