Who votes? (And who cares?)
Commentators love to complain about the apathetic American voter. But does low turnout really matter?
BACK IN MARCH, the Republican party rolled out Reggie the Registration Rig, a blue trailer truck with a fold-out stage, a bank of plasma TVs, a couple of Xbox videogame consoles, and various other goodies. Setting off on a nationwide tour, it spearheaded the GOP drive to register 3 million new voters before the November election. For their part, the Democrats have launched a drive of their own, promising to bring a million new Dems to the polls. Lacking an 18-wheeler, they announced they'd rely on telephones.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, continuing their efforts to snare the elusive youth vote, both parties joined forces with
If not for the Registration Rig, the ranting wrestlers, and the sight of Ed Gillespie on MTV, it would be a familiar picture. Reaching out to the unregistered, the uninformed, and the uninterested is a quadrennial political pastime -- and yet it always seems a bit pointless. After all, we're well acquainted with the apathetic American voter. Nearly every election day, we're told, is another low-water mark in the long ebb of our nation's turnout.
As fewer and fewer of us go to the polls, the news and opinion pages are filled with comparisons between today's meager numbers and those of our bunting-festooned past. In 1996 only 49 percent of the country's voting-age population went to the polls. Inthe 1998 midterm elections, only 33.2 percent bothered to show up. Even the hotly contested Bush-Gore race in 2000 boasted a mere 51.2 percent turnout rate. The polarizing presidency of George W. Bush promises to bring more voters to the polls this year, and may surpass even the recent high-water mark of 55.1 percent -- set in 1992 -- but that's still a poor showing compared with other developed democracies, many of which routinely best our turnouts by 20 percent or more.
But does it really matter? We tend to assume that low voting is a symptom of a disillusioned and disgusted electorate, or that it distorts outcomes -- usually in favor of Republicans -- because the poor vote less than others. Both points, however, are far from settled among those who study our voting behavior. What's more, among that small community of pollsters and political scientists, there's little consensus about whether we should treat low turnout as a slowly unfolding national emergency or merely one of democracy's ineradicable blemishes. Indeed, as Reggie rolls along our nation's highways and byways, it's worth asking what would happen, in the words of voting analyst Ruy Teixeira, "if we held an election and everybody came."
The tale of the American vote is not, as one might imagine, simply one of continuous decay. True, for most of the 19th century 80 percent of those eligible to do so regularly voted. Ironically, it was the Progressives who, seeking to eliminate voter fraud and weaken the big-city political machines, put an end to this golden age by pushing laws that required citizens to register before voting (previously all one had to do was show up). Turnout fell sharply in the early years of the 20th century, climbed through the Depression and again through the 1950s, peaked in 1960 at 63 percent, and has been stepping down irregularly ever since.
When this drop is discussed in the press, it tends to be described as a crisis. Walter Dean Burnham, professor emeritus of government at the University of Texas at Austin and a highly influential figure in the field, believes that's a pretty accurate portrayal. "We are basically an oligarchy that calls itself a democracy," he contends. "It's a very broad-based one, but an oligarchy nonetheless."
As Burnham points out, the poor and less-educated, along with the young, vote at lower rates than everyone else, and the gap is growing. Those who are underrepresented in government have their interests slighted. If everyone voted -- or at least, if fewer people didn't -- Burnham argues, there would be a sea change in Washington. "I don't think a public policy that advocates such an extraordinary class warfare would be successful with a more broad-based electorate," he says.
It's this logic that shapes our debate over turnout: If voting numbers grew significantly, the argument goes, the Republicans would be swamped by the influx of lower-income and minority voters. GOP stonewalling over the 1993 National Voter Registration (or "Motor Voter") Act -- which allowed people to register while renewing their drivers' licenses and applying for public aid at government offices -- stemmed from this belief that more voters would mean more Democrats.
Some analysts, including the Democratic pollster Frank Luntz and Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine, have found evidence in recent elections that supports this belief. And a few years ago, a 100,000-person survey by the Vanishing Voter Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government found that, overall, Democrats did better in the population at large than they did among voters.
At the same time, Motor Voter's legacy might give pause. Apparently, motor voters don't necessarily trend Democratic so much as apathetic. Since the law's passage, registration is up, but voting isn't -- and the Census Bureau found that, strangely enough, fewer people said they were registered in 1996, three years after Motor Voter went into effect, than in 1992, the year before. As Wattenberg writes in his book "Where Have All the Voters Gone?" (2002), "The Motor Voter procedures apparently made registering so easy that many forgot that their names were on the voting ledgers."
More strikingly, a significant body of research suggests that, even if nonvoters somehow found themselves in a voting booth, they would act a lot like today's voters. As Ruy Teixeira, author of "Why Americans Don't Vote" (1987) and "The Disappearing American Voter" (1992), puts it, "It generally seems to be true that the level of voting doesn't make a huge difference in the outcome." Teixeira and others argue that the National Election Studies (NES), a series of polls conducted in every presidential campaign since 1952, as well as other survey data, simply don't show a significant difference between the political preferences of voters and nonvoters.
According to UC-Berkeley political scientist Raymond Wolfinger, who has also studied the NES results, we only assume otherwise because we don't pay attention to the relative size of the different groups in the so-called "party of nonvoters." It's not, in fact, the poor or minorities who make up its bulk. The most decisive factors in whether or not one votes, Wolfinger says, are age, education level, and how long one has lived in the same place."
Once you take those three things into account -- and they don't add up to a politically distinctive group -- other things don't make much difference," he says. If nonvoters did have an impact, Wolfinger adds, it would be to occasionally favor third-party candidates like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. (In 1968, he points out, the segregationist candidate George Wallace was preferred by twice as many nonvoters as voters.)
And yet although who votes doesn't tend to tilt elections, Teixeira says, it can affect the policies a particular administration pursues. "Politicians," as he puts it, "respond to the agendas of the people who elected them." Similarly, Bruce Ackerman, a Yale Law School professor whose most recent book, "Deliberation Day" (2004), takes on voter ignorance and apathy, suggests that a pooh-pooher like Wolfinger "doesn't take into account that the issues [in elections] are being shaped by those who do vote." In other words, measuring the reaction of nonvoters to campaigns that are not pitched to them in the first place is of limited value.
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Even were we to infallibly map the political preferences of every nonvoter, however, the debate would hardly be settled. Ultimately, it's not just a question of electoral outcomes, but of the meaning of the vote.
Some members of the Don't Panic faction go so far as to interpret low turnout as the sign of a happy polity. As the legal scholar and judge Richard Posner wrote in a critique of Ackerman's "Deliberation Day" in Legal Affairs, "The fact that only about half of all eligible voters (and often even fewer) actually bother to vote in most political elections is commonly taken as a failure of democracy. Not at all. The decision not to vote may reflect equal satisfaction with the candidates, equal dissatisfaction, or rational indifference between them." As he sees it, abstention is as likely to stem from satisfaction as dissatisfaction.
Few dispute that a high turnout can represent a displeased electorate. The 1992 presidential race, waged in the shadow of recession and George H.W. Bush's "Read my lips" pledge -- and jolted by the cantankerous third-party candidacy of Ross Perot -- brought out a higher percentage of the voting-age population than any since 1972. But, as Thomas Patterson, head of the Kennedy School's Vanishing Voter Project, puts it, it's generally the case that "satisfaction is correlated with voting, not nonvoting." The elderly, who in poll after poll prove themselves the demographic most satisfied with the government, vote at the highest rates. The most disgruntled -- the young and poor -- vote least.
For Wolfinger, talking about nonvoting as abstention misses the point. "I don't think very many people decide not to vote," he says. "That is how Europeans talk about the subject -- abstention -- which connotes an affirmative act. Here, it isn't that people have chosen for the most part not to vote. They just haven't gotten around to it."
But for some scholars, low turnout is worrisome no matter what bearing it has on who is in office and what they do. Voting, after all, has traditionally been seen as much as a mark of citizenship as a process for choosing representatives. As Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, points out, "Voting tends to be a lowest-common-denominator act." Generally, people who don't vote are less involved in their communities, politically or otherwise. For Ackerman, voting is one of the few "genuine civic contexts" that remain for Americans.
"For most people," Ackerman says, "the only really meaningful context of citizenship is when they get off the plane and show their passport. The idea that people don't think of themselves as citizens sufficiently to enact this minimal ritual has to be of concern. When there are crises, the extent to which people think of themselves as citizens is actually quite important."
One thing everyone seems to agree on, though, is that the Bush-Kerry race will not go down in the annals of apathy. So far, with many seeing the election as a referendum on Bush, everything points toward a respectable bump in turnout this year. As Thomas Patterson puts it, "You have to go back to Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 to find a president who activated both sides of the aisle in the way Bush does." And if this presidential race is anywhere near as close as the last one, marginal differences could swing the outcome.
It may also be worth noting that for Roosevelt, at least, it mattered who voted. In 1936, among the working-class, big-city voters he had so carefully wooed, turnout rose one-third over 1932 and went overwhelmingly Democrat, forging the basis for a political coalition that lasted four decades.
Drake Bennett is a writer living in Cambridge.
