‘We can overcome’ … together
We all know people who don’t vote. People who say their one vote won’t count for much – a spritz of water in an ocean of votes, a crumb, if you will.
And we all know people who say they don’t vote because Democratic and Republican politicians are the same: they’re all crooks, they’re all out to line their own pockets.
Then there is the government-is-irrelevant crowd.
Still others feel that whatever government does it screws up. Better to stay clear of the whole mess. Besides, voting may result in jury-duty. And who needs that?
Studies show these attitudes cut across demographic and income lines. About a quarter of all eligible Americans do not, on average, vote in presidential elections.
Non-voting is most acute among low-income Americans, for in addition to the excuses they have in common with other Americans, poor people do not vote, says a recent study, because they lack transportation to the polls on Election Day, or because they are ill or disabled. (Bingo! mail-in ballots.)
The problem of non-voting is exacerbated, according to the study commissioned by the non-profit Poor People’s Campaign, when candidates ignore the issues which might touch a chord with low-income Americans. The problems of poverty are not normally aired during a presidential campaign.
A factoid illustrates this point. Of the more than three dozen presidential candidate debates held in 2016 and 2020, not one whole hour was devoted to a discussion of poverty in America.
What’s needed, says the study entitled Unleashing the Power of Poor and Low-Income Americans and Changing the Political Landscape, are candidates who will address this imbalance, who will look poor Americans square in the eye while pledging to eliminate or at least mitigate poverty in this country.
Low-income Americans “are underrepresented at the polls,” the Poor People’s Campaign study declares. The poor “are less likely to vote, yet it doesn’t have to be that way.” The poor, and I may add, the near-poor, offer “a new focus for [political] organization” for both parties and candidates.
And why should politicians give a hoot? Will they be rewarded for their efforts? Maybe.
According to the study, based on the 2016 returns an increase of a mere four percentage points in the rate of low-income voting would have jeopardized Donald Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania.
In Michigan, the rate turns out to be even slimmer: one percent. In Wisconsin and Florida, it’s five and seven percentage points respectively.
Sixty-three million poor Americans were eligible to vote in 2016. Thirty-four million did so. That means 29 million votes were left on the table.
What’s needed, and this clearly pertains more to the Democratic than the Republican party because of voting patterns, is an approach that emphasizes “fusion politics,” according to Shailly Gupta Barnes of the Poor People’s campaign – a politics that builds “relationships across races and backgrounds to unite behind commonly held needs and demands.”
What also is required is wider recognition that poverty is not just a black problem, a Hispanic problem, or a native American problem. Poverty in America affects everyone. Of the 13 million U.S. children living in low-income families in 2018, 4.2 million were white, 4 million were Latino, and 3.6 million were African American.
While American Indians (25.4 percent) and black Americans (20.8 percent) were more likely than Hispanics (17.6 percent), whites (10.1 percent) and Asian Americans (10.1 percent) to have incomes at or below the federal poverty line, it shouldn’t be forgotten that casting any American into poverty’s web represents a loss to the nation as a whole, not just to a segment of it.
The same could be said of the prevalence of police violence, though saying so carries the risk of raising the charge of white privilege in the era of Black Lives Matter. (I refuse to believe it’s ever a privilege to shot by police.)
According to the website Statista, as of July, 111 black Americans had been killed by police so far in 2020, along with 71 Latino Americans and 215 white Americans.
The conditions which poverty gives rise to include idleness, despair, personal and family turbulence, and drug addiction. These are equal opportunity problems, affecting white, Black and brown alike.
And while it is true that police misconduct dis-proportionately impacts Black and Hispanic Americans, it is also true that white Americans are killed by police for no good reason.
New voters, along with a broader coalition of voters, may yet nudge the nation into a renewed sense of itself as both decent and great. At the same time, it’s not entirely irrelevant to point out that a politics of reform requires a broad, sustainable coalition.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His most recent book JFK Rising is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.