In 2016, people in Harlem said they were neither surprised nor worried about Trump’s victory.
Nearly 100 million people voted before Election Day, which is just under three-quarters of the total vote in 2016. Partly, that’s due to pandemic fear of crowded polling places, but it also reflects a much broader concern about the current state of politics in America.
Some people vote out of civic duty, others when they are excited, and still others when they are anxious or even scared. But in a typical presidential year, more than 40% of all eligible voters don’t vote at all. Since 1980, the average turnout has been 56%, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This year, predicts Michael McDonald, the University of Florida political scientist who administers the U.S. Elections Project, turnout may reach 65%, which is not only well above average for the past 40 years but a significant jump from the 59% who turned out in 2016. The last time 65% of eligible voters participated in a presidential election was in 1908.
We had hints of what was to come in the 2018 midterms. Four year earlier, turnout was the lowest on record for any midterm election since World War II. In 2018, it was the highest in more than a century. Demographically, people with lower levels of education and income are less inclined to vote, as are recent immigrants. Democrats point to “voter suppression” as the reason, conveniently ignoring that black turnout has grown since the 1990s, even in states with strict voter ID laws, and that in 2012 it surpassed the rate of white voter turnout. An analysis of the 2018 elections by the Pew Research Center reported that “all major racial and ethnic groups saw historic jumps in voter turnout.”
The most likely culprit of lower voter turnout in the U.S. is widespread apathy. A 2008 Census Bureau survey of eligible but unregistered voters found that the largest percentage of respondents (46%) said they were “not interested in the election” or “not involved in politics.” Another 17.5% stated that they were “too busy” to vote, and 12.9% said that they didn’t care for the candidates or for the campaign issues being discussed. Just 6% cited registration problems.
Every so often there are calls for “universal” or mandatory voting laws to get more people engaged. But it’s the people who care about the outcome of an election who are most likely to participate. Do we really want their votes diluted by uninterested people who are voting only because it’s required by law? In a way, voter indifference can signal a healthy democracy. People who decide that voting isn’t worth their time are expressing contentment, a certain level of satisfaction with how much or how little politics and politicians intrude on their daily lives.
Voter turnout in 2008 was the highest since 1960 and no doubt reflected the historic nature of Barack Obama’s election. This year, the uptick in voting most likely reflects the electorate’s apprehension about the country’s future withDonald Trump at the helm, or at least that’s what Joe Biden and the Democrats hope. Mr. Biden spent the final days of his campaign appealing to the black voters who didn’t turn out for Hillary Clinton in Detroit and Philadelphia four years ago and thus may have cost her important swing states. They are the same voters I spoke with in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood a week after Mr. Trump was elected and most of the nation was still in shock.
The people I encountered weren’t Trump supporters, but neither were they especially surprised by his victory or panicky. If anything, they struck me as impassive. A minister told me that he supported the president-elect’s law-and-order message but that the federal government can only do so much about inner-city crime. A hair salon owner from West Africa told me that she thought Mr. Trump’s rants about walls and deportations were mostly bluster. An off-duty police officer said that Mrs. Clinton had spent too much time talking about foreign policy, which to him made her sound out of touch with what was happening here.
We’ll have to wait for the results to find out whether these attitudes hold four years later, but in important ways this relative indifference turned out to be warranted. Before the Covid outbreak, low-income minorities were experiencing record low levels of poverty and unemployment, and no one should be surprised if the president improves his performance among black and Hispanic voters on Tuesday.
In the end, that may not be enough to compensate for a 44% job-approval rating or a sharp decline in support among seniors and suburban women. But whether or not he wins a second term, Mr. Trump has succeeded demonstrably in undermining the left’s notion that Democratic governance is somehow a prerequisite for reducing social inequality in America.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal