It might seem like I was discounting the importance of voting in my last post, but there’s a big difference between how a party selects its officers and candidates and people’s fundamental right to vote in the elections that actually place people in office. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, people’s access to the ballot is being systematically denied:
In 2016, 17 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election. The new laws range from strict photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions.
Those 17 states are: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
(This number increased from 16 to 17 in March 2016 when Arizona’s governor signed a bill limiting collection of mail-in ballots.)
This is part of a broader movement to curtail voting rights, which began after the 2010 election, when state lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote.
Overall, 22 states have new restrictions in effect since the 2010 midterm election. This page details the new restrictive voting requirements put in place during that time period.
Almost all of these restrictions have been enacted by Republican-controlled legislatures in an effort to limit the franchise and give themselves an advantage at the polls. This is a form of controlling who can vote rather than persuading people to vote for you. And, while I think this is certainly justifiable (if not necessarily wise) to do for party leadership elections, it should be completely off limits for general elections.
The fact that these laws always help the Republicans, or at least have that transparent design, should tell you all you need to know about the merits of their arguments in favor of them.
Still, although the right to vote is fundamental, people who are seeking to do more than choose between options–who want to actually effect real change–should realize that they’re no more likely to change their options through a vote in the primary than they are to change a lawmaker’s vote through a simple phone call.
If you flood a lawmaker’s telephone with calls, you might have a chance of changing their vote, but that requires organization.
And that is my point.
Elections come at the end of a long process. Elections always involve choices that were made for you by politically organized people. Controlling the choices is most of the battle, and thinking that you’ve lost your influence because you couldn’t get off work to attend a caucus is a bit misplaced. If you want to make a difference, you’ll organize a dozen people to attend the caucus that you couldn’t attend yourself.
This is the difference between passively participating in the election process and in actually getting power.
I feel like these two things have been conflated and confused as people battle over how the nominees are selected.
If you want to choose between options, then go vote.
If you want to really change things, that’s going to take a lot more commitment, and not everyone is going to have an equal amount of time, energy, and resources for that. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s just an inescapable reality.
Aren’t we ignoring the hyena? Cash.
Sanders has more than he can spend.
This is really being felt at the state level, not federal.
And he is about the only left of center candidate who has shown it can be raised without going hat in hand to Wall Street and the other elites who know better.
What about Barack Obama in 2008? (Or Howard Dean in 2004?)
I think this aligns with my opinion that folks who choose “independent” or “do not state” are basically opting out of the process of electoral change. I think these folks often put energies and commitment into other projects where they feel their influence more directly, such as local environmental issues. And that’s good.
The connection between those efforts and voting in national elections seems elusive to them, though.
I say this as a person often very involved in trying to register people to vote. Most common replies are: a) One vote doesn’t count; b) they’re both the same; c) I don’t believe in voting (because they fear being called for jury duty), etc. I can see their bumper stickers for PEACE or SAVE THE PLANET but they don’t want to vote.
Been there, dealt with that.
What I tell the young people that I know is that they need to get 10-20 people to the polls. Do that, and you might make some kind of difference. Sitting around waiting to cast one vote on election day is not political participation and it’s personal malpractice if you give a shit.
Agreed. But some just don’t give a shit. More than the voting restrictions, the Republicans have been on a campaign to make participation in government seem like nasty, dirty, or useless business. In particular since Obama became president. They dashed the hopes and dreams of millennials who voted for Obama; and at the same time made government ineffective and appear corrupt. So we have “rigged” being yelled from all directions.
Disagree.
If I feel neither party does a good job of representing me, as a voter, I have the choice of being a hypocrite or losing out on shaping who is part of the general election. In any case, you are putting the cart before the horse; independents are not part of the process of electoral change because the parties have put rules in place that prevent it. It’s not the failure of independents but of the political parties.
This sounds like a sure fire way to ensure shitty options when it comes time to vote for president.
And how have you organized your independents? What have you built for them? What have they built for you?
I’m not sure I understand your questions. I never claimed to be building a party. Maybe you should ask those type of questions to someone who claimed to be doing so.
But I will tell you what the Democrats have done for me, since that is who I was associated with in the past:
On the whole: nothing.
The problems that we faced eight years ago have not been resolved. The very financial issues that caused the 2008 crash are still with us, and are once again picking up steam. I’ve lost personal freedoms, financial security, and have fewer protections in the face of the law.
Yes, there have been some good things; but they have been more than overwhelmed by the negatives. So tell me again why I should be so supportive of the Democrats? And saying the GOP would be worse is fear mongering at its best and just another way to dodge the question being asked.
Supreme Court.
Did I mention the Supreme Court?
What of it?
More fear mongering. Doesn’t really address my issues.
If you are not interested in organizing, inside or outside of political parties, how do you expect to achieve the change you want?
You are defining your political experience in this, admittedly imperfectly described way:
Hmmm, let me sit back and see what the Parties have to offer me. One offers me some of what I want and quite a bit which I do not. The other viable Party is worse.
This disgusts me. Sniff…disengage?
Yours is the experience of a passive participant, heading towards a complaining non-participant. There’s no way you will get a response from political leaders if they don’t have to worry about your activism, or even your vote.
And if you think that political leaders and Parties will worry about impressing you more if they have to worry about whether you will vote at all, I encourage you to understand that will not create the change you want.
You have power; use it.
Maybe I don’t bother as I feel it is a waste of time? I see nothing that shows me the Democratic party in its current state cares about the liberal cause I support. In the past I went down this road only to be told to STFU. I wasted my time and was made to feel my voice didn’t count. I’m not going through that again with this party, at least not in its current form.
One party claims to support my views, and then tells me to get lost when I raise my voice in participation. The other party offers me nothing.
Yes, disengage. I’ve got better things to do. And the reason I post on this and a few other sites is to ensure people know that the current system has serious issues and leads to people walking away.
It’s passive now for the reasons I stated earlier. When you get kicked enough you tend to get the message. Oh, I’m still going to vote, so I will be a complaining participant. They didn’t worry about my activism or vote before. And since nothing has really changed from when then happened, this is the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.
The change I want is not coming. The change that is needed is not coming.
I don’t think some people don’t understand this one important point: we are out of time. We no longer have the luxury of building up a new party, of growing a political movement from the ground up. We have 20-30 years before social trends in this nation and the effects of climate change overwhelm our current structural and political systems. I was honestly hoping not to be here when it all fell apart but I don’t know if that is possible.
We might have power, but we have no time to effectively use it.
If you truly believe that things are as dire as you say, organizing is the only way to bring the change you believe we need before we run out of time.
You may decide that your organizing takes place outside the Democratic Party. My organizing takes place mostly outside the Party, but I do organizing on the side with my local and State Party as well. Not that you’re asking, but I would be completely fine with you organizing outside the Party. You could be very productive doing that. At least you would be doing something.
I encourage you to work to persuade more people to take collective action, because the individual route will just keep you in the despair you are in. Commenting on a blog does not constitute collective action.
I think the main point of your previous lengthy post could be made more simply as follows:
Neither Sanders or Trump did anything much to try to build up the Democratic or republican parties until they decided to seek the party nominations until quite recently. Now they suddenly act surprised and annoyed that those parties have rules and office holders in place that they don’t like.
Should all the people who worked so long and hard to build up those parties and hold elected office now simply go home and hand over control to Sanders or Trump even if that’s not quite what the rules say??
Sorry, but if you join a club you don’t get to change all the rules without the agreement of club members who have been there a lot longer than you. Political parties are also about a lot more than just the Presidential election – they are also about building relationships, organisational capabilities, running local candidates etc.
Sanders and Trump want to piggy back on all that work without having paid their dues over many years. But there is no reason why existing party members should simply roll over when a newcomer with balls comes along to take over the show. They have to be won over, and that is what Sanders and Trump have been bad at doing.
Many people confuse Democracy with direct democracy as if one is obviously superior to the other. But politics is also a complex business and skilled art form and there may be good reasons why many decisions are taken by elected representatives rather that ordinary members who may make little contribution other that voting every few years.
The same criticism is often made of the EU because there is no directly elected President. But what’s wrong with a President elected by a parliament or by the heads of Government of all member states? At least they are likely to have a better grasp of what the job actually entails. The alternative is you might get a know nothing like Trump in the Oval Office who hasn’t a first clue of what the job actually requires.
Railing then that party people aren’t just doing what they are told to do smacks of authoritarianism, not democracy.
As far as I’m concerned, Bernie has more than paid his Democratic Party “dues” by being more of a Democrat-in-action than many of the current Democratic Party “leaders”.
And that is , of course, an arguable point of view, but obviously one not shared by a majority of elected office holders within the Dem Party at the present time. There is nothing, of course, to prevent them changing their minds and endorsing Sanders, but so far, only a small minority have done so. Perhaps he took them too much for granted.
Of course it is not a view of the current Democratic office holders. If Sanders is elected, there is a very good chance they lose control of the reigns of power, or at the least least find themselves in a difficult situation. Self interest trumps any other concerns.
I don’t think Sanders took them for granted; I them he took them as a lost cause.
So why then did he bother to run for a party built up by others who he regarded as a lost cause. Why not run as an independent (as Trump has threatened to do).
Perhaps because he felt the party ethos was sound but had been diluted or misused by the current leadership.
Whatever he felt, he didn’t have a winning strategy. He thought he could just convince people without convincing more than one handful of actual elected Democrats. In the end, he didn’t do enough of either, but his strategy was fatally ill-conceived from the beginning.
It’s forgivable because he wasn’t originally trying to win, but for those of us who take this shit seriously, that was the problem at the outset, and doing better than expected didn’t make it better.
It seems to me that doing better than expected actually helped a great deal. Win, lose or draw the Sanders campaign accomplished impressive things. Substantial things; eye-popping fund-raising in the age of superPACs, introducing virtually an entire generation of potential activists to one another, put the old guard on notice… One supposes that taken together the Trump and Sanders campaigns have rattled quite a few windows in the corridors of power. I take that as a win.
How long ago was it argued that the leaderless #occupy movement had no impact or legacy? No grounded, tangible outcomes? Yet here we are almost at the break, apparently, of an unexpected populist wave a few short years later; with “income inequality” on many agendas and the 1% a universally understood shorthand for a fact of our social condition. Isn’t this how it usually works?
Personally I reckon the Democratic Party owes Bernie a pretty comprehensive thank you. All in good time. Who gets his Rolodex, by the way? That would be worth something.
Fine, but why then the outrage that they haven’t fallen over each other to endorse him? Why complain about the Super delegate system when that was always part of the deal. Why would anyone bother to build up a party when any independent can come along any time and take over the fruits of their hard labour (and hard won elected positions)?
The problem is the US electoral system is designed to promote a two party system. If you don’t like the two party system, campaign for a change to a proportional representation system…. Don’t complain that a party does what it has to do to survive in the two party system that exists rather than the one you would like to see exist.
I do agree with you on this point. I’ve been confused as to why they have this reaction when most of what the Sanders campaign embraces runs counter to those politicians they are upset with for non-support. And my issue with the super-delegate matter is that either the campaign, or various big name Sanders supporters, have flip flopped on the issue. I always felt they should have attacked it as undemocratic, and left it at that. The later arguments for why they should get those votes is problematic for me.
Because institutions protect themselves.
Jeremy Corbyn has always been Labour and is getting the same fight, no?
Corbyn has won the party leadership. However he spent his political life opposing all the Blairite leaders within the party, and now they are returning the favour. If he wins the next General election, all will be forgiven; if not, he’s gone.
“…a point of view, but obviously one not shared by a majority of elected office holders within the Dem Party at the present time.” Replace Dem with Labor and you have the same situation as Labour in Britain.
Jeremy Corbin has more legitimacy than Sanders simply because he has always been Labor? Or would you still think Corbin illegit because he is not in step with his party’s establishment?
I support Corbyn because he was by far the best of a very bad set of candidates for the labour leadership. In time he may also achieve considerable change in the British political landscape, move the Overton window, and gain much wider acceptance from the old guard within the party. But there is one standard by which all labour and Tory leaders are judged in the UK: will they win the next General election? If he does that he becomes Prime Minister and can appoint almost none of the old guard to cabinet positions if he doesn’t want to. If he loses he’s probably history, and that applies whether or not he’s left wing.
The Democratic Party isn’t fucking club.
And HOW DARE YOU put Sanders, who has caucused with the Democrats in the House since 1990 and been endorsed by the Vermont State Party for over 25 years in the same sentence with Donald Trump.
You know what – that is the same Party that at the state level is fricken disaster. That has held the House for 4 of the last 22 years.
There is an ideological war in the party between the Clinton types who rolled over on Iraq and the Bush Supreme Court nomination and those who want to fight.
So go defend Iraq. You and you buddies go do fundraisers with Wall Street.
Because your types have been an unmitigated disaster.
I don’t respect your arguments because I do not respect the hacks like those who run the Florida Democratic Party.
You clearly know nothing about me or my politics, and fail to understand the sociological point I was trying to make about the nature of parties as organisations – which has nothing to with any specific policy position. You may be a Sanders supporter, but your ad hominem attack indicates your style is closer to Trump.
If we had a SCOTUS worth a plug nickle all restrictions on voting would of been found unconstitutional.
Which is exactly why we have to organize and work hard to support the Democratic presidential nominee.
Under what theories?
It might seem like I was discounting the importance of voting in my last post,…
But you were because
there’s a big difference between how a party selects its officers and candidates and people’s fundamental right to vote in the elections.
Which means that voters can only choose Tweedledee or Tweedledum because “organizers” (a select group of people in small and large ponds, often well compensated by those with big bucks, that make politics their job for extended periods of time) select the Tweedledees and Twedledums.
Millennials (and many older people) are this time saying, “F** this sh*. The system is rigged at every point in the process including who is allowed to vote on election day. Better hope the GOP doesn’t find a way to deny Trump the nomination because Berners and Trumpers combined are a majority.
What?
Why would you say that, anyone can organize inside the party and it often only costs time.
What?
Is this a serious statement? No, time is not the only thing it “costs”; it also costs actual money. And DNC insiders willing to support you.
To state otherwise ignores the various flame-outs over the years that didn’t have one or the other of these two things.
you’re talking about presidential campaigns and I’m talking about building a party
Yes at a high level you’re going to need money but organizing starts at the bottom and all that usually will cost you is time
No, I’m not. My comments were in direct response to building a movement within a party.
Even at the bottom, you are still going to need money and named supporters if you want any policy or movement to move past the local level.
If you want proof of this, see how many times party or policy movements have started at the local level, and then stayed there. I do agree that at the local level the only real cost is time, but anything past that takes much more.
and I don’t care particularly about building a movement, I want to move the ball forward on our goals
You’re right the party itself will need money to operate, especially the higher up you go because it’s costs money to have office space and have full time operatives.
Yet you can probably influence many state parties with very little money yourself especially since the infrastructure to an extent is already present. It will take time but since so few people actually are involved in the day to day of party management you can definitely have movement especially at the lower levels pretty quickly and move slowly up the chain.
For the purposes of this post, I’m not concerned with how people vote or what they’re upset about.
You’ve got one system vomiting up Trump and Cruz and you expect me to consider that some sacrosanct will of the people?
That’s why we don’t have direct democracy or rule by the momentary snit of the public. We have Courts and representatives and parties and actual leaders. And we all have the freedom to find out how power works and organize to seize a bit of it for ourselves.
If the people vote for Trump or Cruz in November, then I’ll respect their verdict. For now, I only respect those who have the know-how and the power and the organizing skill to change things or keep them the same.
This is such a basic thing for me. I had to write about it because of the incessant confusion about me being simultaneously for a progressive challenge to Clinton and being completely underwhelmed by the actual challenge that emerged.
Two years ago, I was plotting with other veteran organizers on a challenger, but it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a champion with the chops, so we rode off in different directions. I don’t know any of them that became enthusiastic Sanders supporters. There was more interest in O’Malley, because he seemed to get it on the level it needed to be gotten.
But he didn’t have a hook or the chops or the institutional support, and he also started way too late. Plus, he wasn’t the right fit and he had the whole Baltimore problem, too.
This election could have been won by progressives. That’s clear now, and I think we believed it was possible back in ’14. But a combination of no early challenger and Hillary’s popularity with the left made it a no-go.
This post confirms my belief that you are a political insider and have no real interest in changing the system; unless that change is done via the system. Which currently is impossible. Even your phrase “find out how power works and organize to seize a bit of it for ourselves” appears to completely misunderstand the nature of power. You want to know how power works? Those in power fight to keep it. And those out of power are kept from it by those in power. While this nation had a system in place that, for the most part, diluted that power amongst multiple entities to ensure no one group could have too much power, that has almost completely disappeared.
The fact that you can separate out the critical issues being raised, and the importance of this election, and be solely concerned with the process scares the hell out of me. I realize it is for the purposes of this post, but to see how flawed the current system is and see you make the call to man the battlements even in the framework of this post just makes no sense to me.
The system has deep, systemic issues that will soon make it entirely unworkable. What are we to do then?
I’m against impotent bitching. I’m for having power for people who make up the governing left in this country. That means that I’m willing to be part of an organization that I don’t always agree with and to make alliances that stink in my nose from time to time.
The governing left I actually care about is a beautiful thing, and Obama was the first to bring it to fruition. But he’s not a magician, and he can’t replicate himself. But he is leaving a strongly center-left party to contend with an utterly fractured opposition, so he’s given us the widest possible margin of error here, and it’s fortunate because we’re going to need it.
But the governing left has very little power. So what benefit have you gotten by being part of an organization that makes alliances you don’t like, and routinely compromises on the ideals and values of the liberal agenda?
Fair enough, but this is where you an I disagree. I do not see Obama a member of the governing left. He is a DNC centrist. Period. He has done some wonderful things. But he has also done things which have rolled back rights and freedoms of all citizens in the nation. He was not pressured to do what he did in those areas. He didn’t need to be a magician; he just need to have a better moral compass. He is leaving a strongly center party, which has lost most of the youth vote, with a potential center-right replacement to contend with a party which could be defeated by Grumpy the Cat. The margin of error had little to do with him, and mostly to do with the GOP finally running afoul of it’s own awful policies and beliefs.
I don’t have a polite response to this. Instead, I offer my entire body of work going back to 2005.
Not sure I have a polite response to your comment, so I will leave it where it is.
I think that the primary issue has become a hot one this year because of the dissatisfaction that that voters feel about the quality of vetting that the major parties have been doing of candidates.
Yes, of course, organizing turnout to press the issues and policies you want candidates to support is important. Having party officials who are interested in winning power in legislatures and Congress is also important. What some people experienced after the organization work done for the Obama campaign was a complete shut-down when they went to participate in precinct-level meetings. The grassroots-to-county-level structures of political parties have tended always to be corrupt. People are tiring of that corruption being tolerated, of the chicanery involved in election manipulation, and of calls for more commitment to change things.
Any political party that claims to be for progress better have ways of engaging people who have limited time, energy, and resources; otherwise that claim is false and what that party likes is the status quo.
But changing through the electoral political system is not the only way to bring about change. There are means of direct political action and direct action of non-political kinds — actually doing the things that you want to see available as policy, for example–that can bring about change as well.
To understand fully the dissatisfaction with politics as usual, rereading Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia is a helpful exercise. Just look at that world from the point of view of folks who don’t have a lot of time, energy, and resources to be jerked around. The area of planning, zoning, building codes, and other local regulations are some of the most egregious areas of corruption in government in most places. They tend to make individual citizens the most angry the most quickly. And they seem to be perennially unfixable.
That’s what motivates voter anger this year; the amount of stuff that seems unfixable no matter how they vote. Sure the candidates misdirect that anger; that’s what candidates do when they are able to get their campaigns funded independently of the voters. Politics becomes marketing.
“The grassroots-to-county-level structures of political parties have tended always to be corrupt.”
I’d like to read more about this. Specifics, please. Painting with such a broad brush is easy and satisfying as a way to thicken our cynicism. Naming specific instances, one after another, County after County, where true corruption leads to outcomes which disfavor liberalism within the Democratic Party and its selection and support for candidates, which is what I presume you are asking us to infer, that seems a bit harder.
With the experience you reflect in your comments here, I believe you will be able to come up with episodes which meet a common definition of corruption. However, I am wary of “corruption” being used inappropriately as a stand-in for “disagreement”, as it often is. I’d also ask if you and others in your orbit have found it possible to use organizing to defeat corruption where you found it.
I realize you wrote “political parties,” so you may have had the GOP in mind when you wrote this as well. We have been preoccupied with our Party, though, and frankly I’m more interested in the Democratic party and how we might best and most quickly improve it.
We need a system that supports people in being politically active. I believe the caucus system actually does that to a much greater extent than primaries. Efforts should be made to hold them on days at times when people are most likely to be able to attend. At the caucus, there should be opportunity to talk and share and learn — not just vote. It should also be a place where those who are interested in campaigning and organizing can get their first taste and sign up for more.
I’ve 53 and have lived in 6 states. Only one had caucuses. Without question, that process was far more enlivening and engaging than going to a polling place and pulling a lever.
What we need is a reinstitution of CIVICS in our schools. Geez, kids today know nothing of how the political system works or history.
Do we really know the arcana of how the political system works in our own state and local governments? Do we really know the arcana of how the federal government works?
Because what gets paraded in the news is how players can use the arcana to defeat what people think is reasonable policy. Part of the reason that people were encouraged to hate Obamacare (aside from the obvious one) was the use of budget reconciliation (properly) to get around the Republican filibuster and the Democratic loss of a Senate seat.
wasn’t it pretty minor changes to the bill that happened during reconciliation. The bulk of the bill was passed the regular way if my memory serves correctly.
There are problems in the system for sure and most of it has to do with norms vs. rules. Use the filibuster for example, it’s in the rules that it can be used the way it is now (obviously) but norms of the Senate was it was never used this way. So if the GOP is going to continue to way away established norms then the rules of the Senate, in this case, need to be changed.
I’m sure there are rules like that all across the system at all levels. Part of the benefit of electing people to office is I don’t need to know everything about it they do. The key obviously is to elect people you can trust to do a good job within the system or change it if needed.
No, one doesn’t need to know the arcana. But it is helpful to know what a filibuster is, for example. Or how many Supreme Court justices there are, etc. Basic stuff.
Many people do know some of this. They get elected to school boards or town boards or even (as in my case) to local political party leadership. They’re involved in some way in government and have a better sense of it than most. Along the way they learn how legislation is passed. And they learn what legislators can hope to achieve or not, where they might have to compromise because there are folks on many sides of a single issue.
Do you think the majority of folks in NC know how HB2 was introduced, passed, signed … and perhaps now about to be repealed? It’s pretty basic stuff.
And it’s also about the power of competing groups, all part of the “system” but not necessarily elected officials. Power is what we work with in politics. It isn’t rigged. It’s either used effectively or not.
TarheelDem, I always read your posts with great interest because they are smart and I feel more informed for them. Just wanted to say that. And to apologize for my stream of conscience postings.
The great slippage begins.
Why anyone would think there’s anything to learn from polls of this type at this stage of the election is beyond me.
GE polls are starting to matter:
Please explain what this graph is supposed to signify to you. We’re about 200 days from the election, meaning the adjusted r-squared is about 0.4. That’s a pretty damn weak correlation.
Precisely what you said: we are now at r squared of about 0.4. The point being that GE polls are starting to matter, because as you can see, I don’t think people are going to be saying GE polls don’t matter ~100 days out, which does not differ substantially with ~200 days out. You can see my post below to realize that rather than discounting GE polls, go to the cross tabs to see what kind of poll it is.
The correct answer is that it was likely a poor poll, not that polls this early should be ignored. For example, the crosstabs showed Clinton would beat Trump among Hispanics 52%-35%, according to Steve M.
This post is just in time for Bernie’s comment that “poor people don’t vote.”
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/24/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-said-poor-peo
ple-dont-vote/
The MSM is abuzz with it, trying to find out if maybe they can pull a “gotcha”. And they’re finding that they can’t. By gum, poor people really don’t vote anywhere near as much as better off people.
But I haven’t seen one discussion yet where they ask why? Could it perhaps have something to do with all the new laws that make it harder for poor people to vote?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/how-voter-id-laws-are-being-used-to-disenfranchi
se-minorities-and-the-poor/254572/
http://www.npr.org/2015/08/10/431238980/block-the-vote-a-journalist-discusses-voting-rights-and-rest
rictions
Or maybe it has to do with not providing enough pollworkers, voting machines, and polling stations in poor and minority neighborhoods?
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/arizona-primary-long-lines-voting-restrictions
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/new-york-primary-voter-purge
Because even if they say these things affected all groups equally, that’s not really true, because the working poor don’t usually have a lot of time to wait around on line.
Think Kentucky’s gubernatorial election. The folks who were most helped by the ACA (whatever it was called there) didn’t bother to show up to vote in a Dem governor. Why was that?
You’ve put your finger on a complex aspect of poverty and voting that was not adequately covered in Bernie’s brief comment. Still, he was largely right even WRT poor and WC southern whites.
In places like Kentucky, many working-class whites do vote. These people are not exactly living in the lap of luxury. But even if they are having trouble making ends meet, there’s no need to suppress their vote, because they vote Republican.
From the Lexington Herald-Leader, Nov. 14, 2015,
http://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article45093165.html
“‘To be honest with you, a lot of folks in Owsley County went to the polls and voted against gay marriage and abortion, and as a result, I’m afraid they voted away their health insurance,’ Turner said. ‘Which was their right to do, I guess. But it’s sad. Many people here signed up with Kynect, and it’s helped them, it’s been an absolute blessing.'”
The art has been perfected by the GOP, helped in many ways by the failure of Democrats to get through to these voters. It is a textbook case of how politics can work to make sure the poor stay poor, and racism is a big part of it.
On the other hand, that’s not the whole story. It seems that, when it comes to the poorest whites, Bernie’s right — they just don’t vote. And these people are scorned by their somewhat better off neighbors.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_11/poor_white_resentment_of_welfa058732.php
Remember that post two weeks ago on the “Dying Republican Base” ?
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/4/11/113411/752
It seemed to me that Booman expressed sympathy for these people, and he was right to. Race has a lot to do with it, but it’s also mixed up with other cultural and political issues and it isn’t only about race.
“”‘To be honest with you, a lot of folks in Owsley County went to the polls and voted against gay marriage and abortion, and as a result, I’m afraid they voted away their health insurance,’ Turner said. ‘Which was their right to do, I guess.'”
NO no no. You’re supposed to quote Thomas Frank here and shake your head sadly while expressing disbelief that people might vote against their own economic self interest. Acknowledging that people might cast their votes on completely non-economic grounds is an unacceptable ideological deviation.
“…helped in many ways by the failure of Democrats to get through to these voters.”
Is it a failure, though? The Democratic Party cannot endorse inclusiveness, reproductive freedom and civil-rights protections for all minorities and at the same time rail against abortion and gays.
It’s a sad situation that poor Kentuckians chose to vote in a way that wound up depriving themselves of health insurance. I suppose I could go on a rant about reactionary evangelical Christians, but what’s the point? The truth is, I’ve got no answer to this conundrum and thank my lucky stars that I live in a state unlike Kentucky.
for why I find it so hard to give any serious consideration to the notion that anyone still choosing to remain affiliated with the GOP despite that crime against democratic values/principles could somehow nevertheless be a decent, ethical human being.
See my comment up thread.
Maybe it’s not ethical, but there it is. And given that reality, I don’t think you win hearts and minds with the attitude, “You vote GOP, therefore you’re not ethical or decent, therefore fuck you.”
What you really want to do is win their vote by convincing them that they’d be better off if they did. From the POV of the art of politics, if you can’t do that, that’s your problem not theirs. That’s why not running a fifty-state policy has been a disaster for the Democratic Party, and a mark of its corruption.
Life is not just black and white. It’s not good to demonize whole swathes of people, that will guarantee that nothing can change. People aren’t simply ethical or unethical — they are a mix. They won’t suddenly change overnight, but if you can get their vote and things improve they may stay with you. FDR did this. Bernie’s trying to.