Discussion for article #229165
And this is why your donations are mostly best directed at efforts to get out the vote, esp. low income vote. GOTV
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I wonder if the people not voting just don’t have any candidates they want to vote for. Or even think they got burned on “hope and change.”
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And I’m wondering if the polls that you are counting the folks who are working 2-3 jobs to make ends, Many of whom, as I understand it, are very serious about increasing the minimum wage. Remember, it is clearly known to the masses that your party have NOTHING to offer but more misery…that’s all you’ve got and that’s why you can’t talk about it. Keep on thinking you got this in your cuff…sure you do and you’ve got the record to prove it INOT)!
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More likely they are struggling so hard to make ends meet that they don’t have enough time to devote to figuring out which candidate they should support. They get frustrated by politicians that seem to be in it for themselves. The media’s he-said-she-said reporting that doesn’t point out falsehoods is no help to them either.
It frustrates me to no end sometimes how people don’t pay attention to politics, but at the same time I am even more frustrated and mad at the news media for failing these folks. They shouldn’t be forced to figure this all out on their own.
I’d also like to specifically address your last bit about being burned on “hope and change”. There are surely some people out there that feel like they got burned, but they really didn’t. That goes back to my blaming a lot of this on media. The people that feel burned only feel burned because they didn’t get the pony they were expecting or because they haven’t been paying attention.
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Compulsory voting is actually the only way to get theoretically rational people to vote–in the present US system, people who vote are spending the time and perhaps gas to get to the polling place to earn a lottery ticket that might, in the most remote of circumstances, decide an election. Unless their preferred candidate is going to give them a check for thousands of dollars, there’s no way voting is cost-effective. The only reason to do so is for reasons of symbolism, duty, or good feelings (all valid, but probably not as compelling as self-interest).
In some places with compulsory voting it’s fairly controversial (e.g. Brasil), and it’s clear that it will never happen here without some long-term Democratic majorities.
In fact, I’m undecided on whether I support it. But it’s a far more reliable way to boost turnout than appeals to civic duty and hopes that people don’t notice the long odds.
I think I could get behind this idea. I’m sure we’d hear howls of vote buying from wing nuts but they’ll find something to howl about regardless.
Why are you undecided? I’m sure there’s something I haven’t considered yet.
This is a classic representation of oligarchic voting. It’s a demonstration, albeit far more detailed than the typical undergraduate assignment of such an analysis, of the absolute requirement that political scientists must have a mastery of statistics and statistical analysis if they are to produce anything that is motivating to the non-collegial members of the school of political science. The statistics are more damning when considered in the context of real-life application.
For example, one observation of the statistics here that would provide a more sinister and chilling insight is the study of the intentional reasons for change versus unintentional reasons for the decline in voter turnout is a study of the Democratic Party since 1980. At that time, Corporatist Democratic operatives in the party structure at that time vowed that the Democratic Party would never again “…have a Jimmy Carter…”. This was largely considered the point that the Democratic Party abandoned organized labor in favor of the monied class of Democratic Party membership. This, then, was the birth of the Democratic Leadership Council-type of Party operative, although it wouldn’t be named such until the defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), for those who don’t follow party politics closely, is a group of powerful Democratic Party officials who believed that the Democratic Party membership was nominating candidates who were too far to the left of the USA electorate. That for the Democratic Party to re-gain the White House, Congress, Governorships and State Legislatures, the Democratic Party would have to model itself on the “…Ronald Reagan type…” candidates.
This ad hoc, unelected group of the wealthy and powerful in the Democratic Party was exclusively constituted from the Southern Democrats who remained with the Party after the “White Flight” of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party and the Conservative (but wealthy) Democrats. With their money and positions of power within the Democratic Party, they effectively seized control of the Democratic Party. The DLC elected its first member when Pres. Bill Clinton became president. Which is why we had “welfare reform,” elimination of financial benefits to mothers who couldn’t get a job within 26 weeks even if the Federal Government wouldn’t provide for babysitters for the child or children that she had, the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act (Thanks for the 2008 financial collapse Mr. President. Those of us who lost all of our 401k and now have nothing to live on except Social Security really appreciate it), a failure to remove the cap on the wages that could be taxed for FICA taxes in favor of cutting the elderly back to eating cat food just live again, failure to pass a “Medicare for all” program, but with all the huge gaps in the current program eliminated and a Federal Budget slashed beyond all reason with no tax increases that could have eliminated the Reagan Tax Cut deficit that was out of control.
These are just a few of the examples of the horrors that the DLC have worked on the Democratic Party’s worker bees. Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, the current long serving head of the Democratic National Committee, is a charter member of the DLC and an avowed enemy of labor. Of course, all these DLC-types forget that it was labor unions that provided the reliable engine for getting out the vote.The Democratic Party voters. Now, most of the labor union members and leadership have either stopped engaging in political efforts or are closet Republicans.
This voter suppression cannot be ascribed to only ALEC and the current wave of wingnut Republicans. The voter suppression efforts were started from within the Democratic Party long before ALEC was ever formed. That is why getting out the vote is so vitally important.
The one sure way to take back the Democratic Party and elect more liberals across the country is to pass a law making it mandatory to vote in all Federal elections. Place a $500.00 levy on the wages of anyone who doesn’t vote. The wealthy, who constitute 10% of the population, could care less about $500.00. But the working person, with the ridiculously low wages paid currently under our Minimum Wage Act, to those people $500.00 is whether the family eats for the next two weeks or not. Who is going to make sure and vote then? You bet your sweet bippy that’s who!
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Which is why this article stresses that self-interest more successfully motivates people to vote than civic duty. But you, of course, smugly dismiss self-interest as “non-cost-effective” for voters unless there is an immediate four-figure payment to each voter. In doing so, you overlook the empirical evidence from states that have narrowed voter participation gaps among different income classes, as this article clearly states, and provides links to some of the relevant studys.
The cost-effective payouts come through legislation targeted at politically reliable voters, which in the case of upper income voters are considerably higher than four figures. We, who are not rich, pay for this largesse to the rich in the potential tax and social policys to benefit middle and low income Americans that are never enacted when we don’t reliably vote with high participation in every election.
You are wrong that a rational voter can only win if her/his single vote might, in the most remote of circumstances, decide an election. A truly rational voter knows that elections are won by a larger number of like-minded voters choosing their preferred candidate over other candidates. It is a group win, in which the individual voter shares. In your lottery allusion, buying many tickets as part of a group gives one more chances to win than buying a single ticket. And elections are also like the lottery, where you must be “in it to win it”!
Cynicism give self-satisfying feelings of superiority, but, like a narcotic, it also dulls appreciating presented facts and seizing real opportunitys. I’ve been there, done that; “I told you so” are self-defeating words.
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This awareness of who votes and why they vote has never been lost on the wealthy. John Jay (“Those who own the country ought to govern it.”) even thought such awareness about spending and taxing preferences was sufficient grounds to keep the non-landed poor from voting at all. It may also explain why certain members of the Federalist Society get wood at the mere mention of Jay.
Nailed. It.
I AM NOT EQUATING RATIONAL WITH GOOD, SMART, OR ANY OTHER POSITIVE ATTRIBUTE. I AM SIMPLY TALKING ABOUT RATIONALITY IN THE ECONOMIC SENSE, WHERE IT’S POSITED (SOMETIMES INCORRECTLY) THAT PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS OUT OF SELF-INTEREST.
It’s not that people shouldn’t vote or are stupid to do so. (I vote and am irrational to do so, except for the good feeling it causes.) I’m saying that you can’t motivate people by rational self-interest, at least by the conventional definitions of such, because the probability their vote matters is very low.
A truly rational voter knows that elections are won by a
larger number of like-minded voters choosing their preferred candidate
over other candidates
Except that a truly rational voter also understands that her decision to vote doesn’t lead anyone but herself to vote. (Perhaps she also offers rides to family and friends, and phone banks a bit…) It doesn’t matter what would happen if her decision were multiplied by 100,000, because those 100,000 people are not asking her whether she voted before they vote. Her decision doesn’t affect them.
So what if everyone thought like I do? That’s precisely the point! Why should the system presume that they don’t think in the way? Or why should it give, for example, minorities or the poor in toto less of a voice because each voter, individually, realizes they can’t change anything? Do you see the difference between individual rationality and fairness of group outcomes?
(People who don’t vote certainly shouldn’t be shamed for thinking that whatever they were doing was more important than investing effort to acquire a lottery ticket at 100,000 to one that might rarely change an outcome.)
In fact, it’s probably more rational to drive two miles to phone bank than to drive two miles to vote! If you phone bank you might get in one or two dozen calls, maybe more. You can only vote once.
The argument against (at least when I was in Brasil briefly and hearing political ads) is that mandating the vote is somehow disrespectful of freedom to not participate. I’m sympathetic to that idea, but also recognize this as a classic collective action problem.
It’s a bit like the decision to bring electric power lines to your neighborhood. If each individual had to pay the cost to construct power lines, few people would have electricity. But because we have utilities, which are granted monopolies, we all benefit from something that we wouldn’t individually invest in. (I’m leaving out some subtleties there but hopefully you get the idea.)
And I was criticizing your faulty understanding of rational in the economic sense. Given your preferred example, it is too narrowly simplistic.
P.S. I remember you posting the exact same comment before a past election. Help me out here, was it 2012 or 2010?
Election day should be a national holiday. And held on a weekend.
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