Voter Turnout

Dear Friends,

The Clinton campaign and its supporters have been spending a lot of time lately telling supporters of Bernie Sanders that they need to vote for Hillary Clinton or they are essentially voting for Donald Trump and that Bernie Sanders need to drop out of the race and work for Hillary Clinton because he has no chance of winning.  Besides Hillary Clinton has already announced that she is the nominee.  I have read a couple of articles that are worth your time to read.

The first is by Seth Abramson on Huffpost Politics entitled " How to Explain the Sanders Campaign to an Idiot, Paul Krugman or a Clintonite in 8 Sentences" (here).  Despite the snarkiness of the title, the post contains a cogent argument for why the Sanders campaign should continue until all the votes are cast at the Democratic convention.

The second is a post by Jake Johnson on Common Dreams entitled "No, I Won't Work for Hillary Clinton: A Response to Robert Reich" (here).  It is a very thoughtful and thought provoking piece in response to a Facebook post by Robert Reich (here) who had given advice to the supporters of Hillary Clinton and to the supporters to Bernie Sanders.  The advice to the supporters of Bernie Sanders is as it always is - Hillary Clinton is better than Donald Trump and if you do not vote for her you are essentially voting for Donald Trump and how can you stand to do that.  Anyway, while I will vote for Hillary Clinton if she is the nominee, the post certainly made me think.

All of this talk of blaming Sanders' supporters if Hillary Clinton gets the nomination and loses to Donald Trump got me thinking about voter turnout.  So I did some research.

Counting caucuses, Bernie Sanders has received probably somewhere around 11,000,000 votes so far.  For my purposes I would divide that group into a group of Democrats like me who vote every election and certainly every Presidential election and for whom this year will be no different.  The other group is a group of people who do not vote every election or even every Presidential election.  Who knows the percentages but let's say 50/50.  So maybe by the time the voting is done there will be   7,000,000 but certainly less 10,000,000 Sanders' supporters who are at risk of not voting.  That sounds like a large number, and it is but it pales compared to the number of Americans who just plain do not vote.

A little over a year ago, the Pew Research Center published a report on the voter turnout for the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (here), basically the world's leading industrialized democracies.  Of the 34 countries, the United States ranked 31st in turns of voter turnout with just 53.6% of voting age people voting.  Belgium ranked first with 87.2% of voting age population, and Germany was right in the middle at 17th with 66% of voting age population.  To put these percentages into perspective.  In 2008 Obama got 69.3 million votes and beat McCain by 9.7 million votes.  If 66% of the voting age population had voted (same as Germany), there would have been an additional 17.5 million votes cast, more than double the margin of victory.  If 87.2% of the voting age population had voted (same as Belgium), there would have been an additional 65.3 million votes, almost 7 times the margin of victory.

The problem with the American electoral system is that we do not have a culture of voting.  I believe in large part the lack of voting is the direct result of the lack of exciting candidates and the almost constant problem of voting for the lesser of two evils.  I calculated the percentage of the voting age population that the winners in the last nine Presidential elections.  In only two elections did the winner get more than 30% of the voting age population - Reagan in 1984 with 31.1% and Obama in 2008 with 30.7%.  The average is about 27%, just over a quarter of the voting age population voted for the person who became President.  A democracy should not work like that.

This year both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are making the lesser of two evils argument all the time.  Donald Trump's best argument for Republicans and Independents is that he is not Hillary Clinton and many Republicans and Independents will vote for him as the lesser of two evils.  Hillary Clinton's best argument for Democrats and Independents is that she is not Donald Trump and many Democrats (including me) and Independents will vote for her if she gets the nomination for just that reason - the lesser of two evils.

As a country, we must do more to develop a culture of voting so that the majority can govern.  We could start with automatic voter registration and a national holiday for election day.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal