I would say the legalization of mass disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and voter intimidation is doing a lot more than mere media propaganda. This isn’t a question of apathy, it’s one of ballot access.
If you can straight up deny people the ability to cast a vote, then have a neo-conservative outlet insist the electoral results were due to voter laziness, you can create the illusion of legitimacy in the face of violently suppressed public opposition.
You make it sound like a new phenomenon; only 58% of the voting-eligible population turned out in 1980. 63% voted in 2024
You make it sound like a new phenomenon
I certainly did not. Disenfranchisement is a tradition at least as old as democracy itself. FFS, we explicitly denied half the population the vote until 1919, simply because they weren’t born with balls. But then they weren’t “eligible voters” so even when they were flinging bricks through windows and roughly up state assemblymen to win their right to the ballot, they didn’t count towards voting statistics.
If you want talk about turnout, nevermind “eligible”. Consider we’re a nation of 347M people, only 151M got handed a ballot. That’s 43% not 63%. A full one in five Americans are entirely ignored by our political class.
But then again, if those last 20% were included, would you be happy with the people they voted for? So much of these “not enough people are voting” complaints I see drop off the radar as soon as their team starts winning.
A huge chunk of the US population is either:
- too young to vote
- not a citizen
There’s a reason I choose to compare with voting eligible population
too young to vote
An arbitrary designation set by statute
not a citizen
An arbitrary designation set by statute
Again, you could say the same thing of women before 1919. Or slaves before 1870. Just pointing at tens of millions of people and saying “You don’t count because we said so”.
There’s a reason I choose to compare with voting eligible population
Because you’re trapped in the same backwards headspace as Stephen Douglas circa 1858. Or John fucking Adams, trying to explain to his wife Abigail why nobody at the Constitutional Convention wanted their wives to participate.
Eighty million people didn’t bother to vote last election.
There is a lot of apathy you see it every day on this platform with people saying that Democrats are just as fascist as MAGA so what’s the difference?
If I understand it right, the last time the democrats had a majority in both the house and senate was in Obama’s first two years. The ACA was the result of that, and it was still watered down due to pressure.
Without control of both houses, the dems are forced to heavily compromise to avoid government shutdowns and just to keep the USA plodding along, food on the table, and kids in school. Fighting just to end up with more or less the status quo was still better than the lurch to the right and insanity that is seen now.
I fear it’s too late for the US now though… at least without some military intervention come voting time. I’m sure they’ll be too busy though. It’s perversely still in china and russia’s interests to keep trump in power, and flare ups will almost certainly be well timed… as they say, never interrupt your enemy while they are busy making mistake after mistake after mistake.
They had a majority during the 1st two years of the Biden administration, which got us the Inflation Reduction Act, which was basically industrial policy to create jobs around ending our need for fossil fuels. The Republicans almost entirely repealed that law earlier this year.
The Obama era got us as much as it did because the Democrats had a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate for a few weeks.
Eighty million people didn’t bother to vote last election.
Four million Americans are explicitly disenfranchised under felony voter laws. Meanwhile, Texas alone, removed one million names from its voter registry on the eve of the 2024 election. These purges are common throughout the American south and midwest, from Arizona to Ohio to North Carolina.
Assuming I don’t want to run down every last person legally disenfranchised by one method or another, we’ll be conservative and leave the total at 75M. The biggest single gap in turnout by volume is California, with nearly 10M eligible voters failing to show up on election day (conveniently, California only disenfranchises felony inmates, so there’s not much double counting here). It might also be worth noting that New York State has some of the strictest voter registration laws in the country, explaining its own dismal annual turnout, accounting for another 7M no-shows. Illinois have similarly mediocre figures, accounting for another 5M.
But these folks “don’t matter” from the perspective of a Democratic campaign strategist, because these are already safe blue states. The so-called apathy doesn’t hurt Democrats in the slightest. In many ways, its a benefit.
The states where “apathy” matters are the swing states. I single these out because you otherwise have to assume apathetic voters are all Democrats. And Greg Abbott neatly disproved this claim between 2014 (one of the worst turnout years of Texas history) and 2018 (one of the best) by adding nearly as many Republican voters to his total as his Democratic opponent, during a liberal wave election. Clearly, the apathy gap is not one-sided. It does not, alone, decide elections for conservatives.
But lets assume Dems win on the margins. In 2024, there were really only five swing states - Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. New Hampshire went blue (and its very small) so we don’t really give a shit about apathetic voters here. The remainder are peculiar because in two out of four cases, Democrats won statewide at the Gubernatorial and Senatorial levels, but lost the Presidential bid. Michigan and Wisconsin both sent Democrats to the senate (Slotkin and Baldwin, respectively). Pennsylvania handed its Senate seat to McCormick by 15,000 votes while Trump took the state against Harris by over 120,000 votes. Georgia didn’t have a statewide race in 2024, but its notable that they’re hosting two Democrat Senators neither of whom came within 200k votes of the Trump 2024 win, four years earlier.
So how do you square this circle? Why are Republicans losing down ballot even with Trump coat-tails pulling the party out of the 2018/2022 doldrums? And why would states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania - which regularly host some of highest turnout figures in the nation - still voting Republican?
