What if we actually tried to get nonvoters to vote?

Over the course of election season, you’re going to hear about a lot of different kinds of voters. Registered voters, likely voters. Old and young, black and white and “other”, center-left and far-left. Throughout the race, we will continue to report temperature checks on these groups — who is rising and falling with each demographic? Who is coalescing support? Who is becoming… Electable?

Occasionally, begrudgingly, we will also acknowledge a different group — nonvoters. And no matter the source, this group is characterized in the same way almost every time they are invoked — the apathetic assholes who are going to fuck this up for all of us.

Nonvoters bewilder the politically-engaged in much the same way you can find stalwart media figures bewildered by the campaign of Bernie Sanders. That is, they are bewildered by something they seem to be completely unwilling to attempt to understand. To most politically-engaged people, nonvoters exist in spite of principles they take as a given, that voting is not only a privilege but a mandate for those of sound mind and body. To disregard this would be to stick your head in the sand, or worse, openly advocate for the least desirable future state. Maybe you don’t care. Maybe you want to sow chaos. Maybe you feel these ways because your privilege protects you from an election’s impact.

All of this, of course, is bullshit.

. . .

In 2016, approximately 111.2 million voting-age U.S. citizens did not vote in the Presidential election. That’s a lot of privilege!

That’s more people than voted for Trump. That’s more people than voted for Hillary. If “No One” was a candidate, they would be our current President. But for whatever reason, this time around, the party apparatus declaring this to be the most important election in American history doesn’t seem to be very interested in engaging with these potential voters!

It is interesting, instead, how this plurality of Americans often gets treated within political discourse. Most analysis excludes them from the get-go, as we tend to focus on the whims of “likely voters” in quantifying candidate support, and we prop up cable news pundits to remind us of the types of candidates who have or have not received the most votes in the past. Whenever we attempt to make a plea to nonvoters, it is typically in the tone of a judgmental parent. Don’t you realize how important this is? You have a responsibility. Do not take it lightly.

Meanwhile, forests of pages have been written in an attempt to understand, analyze, and predict the sensibilities of the “swing voter” who exists in a theoretical “middle” between our parties and can only be swayed by “moderation”. For decades this has been the norm, and such a norm can help explain to non-Americans why we now have what they would describe as two extremely similar, center-right parties as our only options, the long-term result of two sides obsessed with winning over the middle.

On the other hand, nonvoters are always assumed to be a static, permanent designation. This has everything to do with the utter disdain that the politically-engaged have for the nonvoter. They have been programmed by dogma written into a myriad of political identities that sanctifies the act of voting as the sole act of political participation defining their very values of liberty and justice for all. To vote is to participate. To participate is to honor our founding fathers. To neglect this sacred privilege, handed down by our noble ancestors, metaphorically defended by generations of war casualties, is to reject America itself. It is to hold your nose to the very ideals of democracy. More than anything else, it is to not care.

To these defenders of the vote, arguments concerning the trustworthiness of our systems or leaders are entirely moot, as are questions of the value of an individual vote. No one feels the need to write think-pieces celebrating the benefits of voting. No one is writing arguments on why anyone should vote in the first place, at least, none that are written with a nonvoting audience truly in mind. The value of the vote is without question, and those that have already failed to recognize this value proposition must be too simple or too unpatriotic to be reasoned with.

In my opinion, it is this dismissive condescension with which we treat nonvoters that will ultimately doom the left in this country.

. . .

Here is my simple plea — I want you to consider how not voting may be a reasonable, thoughtfully-reached conclusion from a politically-engaged individual in our country.

Why would a person in this country believe their vote doesn’t matter? Why would a person in this country believe their problems aren’t going to get better? Why would a person in this country believe politicians aren’t interested in helping them?

If your biggest issue is gun control and you’ve been voting for candidates promising to do something about it for decades, what is convincing you that the next promise is one to believe?

If you knew exactly how dangerous Trump was in 2016, voted against him in a red state, and saw the popular vote results come out and your candidate still lose… What is convincing you that your vote is going to matter more this year?

As a voter, even if you disagree with a particular conclusion above, can you have sympathy for the path that led one there?

Let’s imagine you’re a voter who has been burned before. Or maybe you’ve never bothered to vote, not because you don’t care about the issues, but because you don’t come from a community of “virtuous voters”. Instead of being told growing up that you would have to be crazy to neglect your voting privilege, it was the opposite. You were taught instead that only the very gullible believe a politician who tells you they are going to make things better.

But then something happens — a candidate starts running for office who tells you their campaign is going to be different. This candidate then, against all odds, actually convinces you that they are not lying. Their campaign is different. Maybe they look and sound different from the candidates you are used to seeing. Maybe their campaign acknowledges a reality that you experience. Maybe their campaign embraces an idea you know to be right but have never thought to be possible.

Imagine, then, being told that your candidate can not and will not win. The person telling you this will not necessarily reject the candidate’s ideas. They will not tell you that the candidate is a liar. They will not question the reality that you experience. They will ultimately not refute anything about your candidate or the platform, and instead they will do something else — they will talk about “electability”.

And here is the perverse part — they will tell you, someone who has long questioned the very meaning of participating in an election — that the ELECTION is too important. The ELECTION is too important for you to vote for a candidate because of their IDEAS. The ELECTION, ipso facto, is more important than the IDEAS. Your whole life you have been skeptical of so many politicians who act in their own self-interest over that of the voters. And now, you are being told that it is your democratic duty to base your vote on helping the right politician win, regardless of how you think they might help you.

To a nonvoter (and ultimately to any of us) — what is important about an election, any election, absent of ideas?

If an idea has inspired you to participate in an election, imagine being told that the idea is not what is important. Instead, what is important, is winning the election.

If you are a nonvoter — win the election for who?

The ultimate failing of the Democratic Party is the smug assumption that anyone who finds themselves on the left side of the political spectrum will support them no matter what. They do not leave any room in the discourse for acknowledgment of all that they have done to push away those who have felt left out or betrayed by the party. To do so would be to force an actual reckoning within the party — a reckoning that could have found a path to embrace the genuine progressive movements that are now happening in this country only in SPITE of the Democratic Party, led by organizers and activists outside of it. Instead, we are witnessing a pivotal moment for the American left — will those who have been activated by extra-party progressive groups be welcomed by the powers that be? Or will they have their ideas dismissed by the very people demanding their votes?

If you want more people to vote for the candidate you support, there are only a couple of ways to do it. You can convince them of your candidate’s character. You can convince them of your candidate’s platform. Or you can put on your best political-pundit hat, and try to predict who can sway the most voters and win. We live in an era of politics where folks on the American left are spending far too much time arguing among themselves as pundits, in a discourse that inevitably excludes nonvoters from the very start. Why would a typical nonvoter compromise what they believe in so a candidate of a particular party can win?

Every election cycle, we lament the statistics of voter turnout. Oh, what a shame it is. An absolute travesty. This, in the greatest Democracy in the world. Who can even begin to explain the apathy? No matter who wins this November, someone will be writing articles blaming the results on those who sat this one out.

But if the best reason we gave them to vote in an election was to “win”, who do we have to blame?

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