Why Don’t Democrats Vote? I’ll Tell You Why.
As you may have heard, Democratic turnout dropped off a cliff again last year, just like it did in 2010. I was wondering why, so I asked. I polled Florida non-voters. I found that the main reason why they didnt vote last year was simple: They couldnt see any difference between the candidates. When there is no difference between the candidates, Democrats dont vote, and Democrats lose.
By way of background, the top race in Florida last year was the race for Governor. The Republican incumbent was Rick Scott, whose hospital chain perpetrated the largest Medicare fraud in history. (That is not a misprint.) Nevertheless, because he had an ® next to his name on the 2010 ballot, he won. He has been a horrible governor, easily one of the worst in the country. Everyone knew that the Democrats had a chance to bring him down last year, especially since our Democratic President had carried Florida twice in a row. There are 500,000 more registered Democrats than registered Republicans in Florida.
The Democratic nominee was Charlie Crist, a REPUBLICAN former governor. Crist was so far to the right that he was known as Chain-Gang Charlie. In 2010, when Scott was first elected, Crist killed the Democrats chances for a US Senate seat from Florida by dropping out of his own Republican primary, where he was 25 points down, and running as an independent. That stinking maneuver (as Yitzhak Rabin would have put it) made Marco Rubio the junior senator from Florida.
Rather than shunning Crist for blowing that 2010 Senate race for the Democrats, the Democrats actually recruited him. They crowned someone who was a Republican just a few years earlier, and a conservative Republican at that, as the Democratic nominee for governor.
Political strategists called this a brilliant move by the Democratic Party. And Democratic voters were appalled, as my own little poll showed. Democratic voters stayed home in droves, and the Democrats lost.
As Gov. Howard Dean has said, if you offer people a choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they will choose the real Republican every time. And they did. Getting back to our poll, we focused on people who actually could have voted, not permanent residents, convicted felons whose rights had not been restored, or children. We offered the non-voters 12 different reasons to explain why they hadnt voted. Reason #1, the most popular, was that people did not like either choice for Governor. Forty-one percent of the Democratic non-voters said that this was the main reason why people didnt vote.
By the way, the non-voters were overwhelmingly Democratic, whether or not they were registered as such. When asked whom they had favored in the 2012 Presidential race, they chose Obama over Romney by 17 points. President Obama won Florida among the actual voters by less than one point.
So, lets be honest. When we put up a pseudo-Democrat or a neo-Democrat or a quasi-Democrat or a semi-Democrat for Team Blue, our voters are not amused. They are not fooled. And we only hurt ourselves.
The voters deserve a choice. In fact, they insist on it. Or they simply wont vote.
Courage,
Rep. Alan Grayson
P.S. Big news tomorrow.
ChazInAz
(2,569 posts)The Democratic party keeps giving us nonentities, so McCain stays in office. This year, we actually have a real Democratic candidate in Anne Kirkpatrick (Someone amongst our dozy POB MUST have slipped up!), so we may actually be rid of that plague upon our land.
corkhead
(6,119 posts)I think it was Truman who originally said the thing about real and fake republicans btw.
I am looking forward to seeing an easily discernible difference in the candidates running for the soon to be vacant Florida Senate seat next year.
iandhr
(6,852 posts)I think it's good that someone like Crist is now a Dem. Many great Democrats were at one point in their life Republicans. (John Lindsay, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren to name a few)
If you really believe that there is no difference between Rick Scott and Crist ask the 750,000 people in Florida who would've gone and health care because Ceist would have expanded Medicade.
If you failed to show up to vote in Florida in 2014 you are no better than the people who voted for Nader and handed the election to Bush.
Grayson is a hypocrite. He yells Republicans are evil for using offshore tax shelters at the top of lungs he uses the Cayman Islands for his own investment funds. It's amazing that people here trying to ignore that fact about him.
dreamnightwind
(4,775 posts)You will get little love on this site for this post, but it is the truth and needs to be said, over and over again until it is no longer true.
It isn't that there is NO difference between the candidates our party establishment puts up and the candidates the Republicans put up. It's that, on many issues, the difference is one of minor degree, rather than one of direction and principle. And given the positions that monied interests in this country support, that is not a good thing. We don't need a third party in the U.S., we need a second party.
Anti-war, anti-surveillance, support for a strong social safety net so citizens don't have to worry about their future, bringing incarceration down to a civilized level and treating drug offenses as health problems rather than criminal acts, building sustainable systems that create local jobs people can do without feeling that they are contributing to carcinogenic capitalist planetary destruction, valuing people and community rather than profits and extraction industries, a few off the top of my head, I'm sure I'm missing many, these are a few examples where our party establishment cannot look us in the eye and claim to be truly on our side of these issues.
Congressman Grayson, if you read these posts, I am wondering, if our elected officials had a clean revenue source they could turn to rather than taking corporate "donations", would they then represent our interests, or are the people that rise through the party establishment so corrupt that the money is not causative but is more of a reflection of their actual interests?
I think we could come up with clean revenue sources through crowd-funding, if it would enable our representatives to serve us rather than corporate donors, and still fund their reelection efforts. It would certainly be much cheaper for the citizens in the long run than to let the corporations control our representatives, and it would not require a constitutional amendment, since the corporate funding would still exist, we'd just put strings on our money so it wouldn't go to people who also took corporate money, then we'd vote only for the clean candidates.
Number9Dream
(1,562 posts)My Congressman is Republican, Charlie Dent (PA-15th). Last year, he ran unopposed by any Democratic opponents. Democrats in the 15th district would love to vote for any Democratic candidate against Charlie Dent, but the Democratic Party can't come up with a single candidate to run against Dent. The Party leadership is letting down thousands of Democratic voters, not the other way around. Yes, the district was gerrymandered, but does that mean Dems should just surrender the district forever? This isn't exactly motivating turnout.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)... who voted against unions, donated to charter schools, offshored jobs to China and praised Wanker's union-busting Act 10.
Yet when we ran a "Madison liberal lesbian" against Tommy Thompson we managed to elect her to the US Senate.
No more corpo-Dems!!!
swilton
(5,069 posts)I watched the tragedy unfold as the real Democrat lost the primary to the corporate Clinton apostle.
Nitram
(22,822 posts)The right wing votes because they've been scared shitless by the right wing media.
4dsc
(5,787 posts)When we run candidates who are too afraid to take on republicans we also lose.
swilton
(5,069 posts)Totally are deaf to the masses to protect themselves and their 'investments'...
Just hope Sanders makes it and we have the end of the beginning and not the beginning of the end.
gmb92
(57 posts)Democratic turnout during midterms was down across the country, both 2014 and 2010. I get why some voters would rationalize not voting for Crist (although there's still plenty of reason to choose a light conservative, who supported Obama, over an extremist like Scott) but it's a stretch to extrapolate that to the rest of the country. If insisting on close to 100% perfection in a candidate is required to get any decent turnout, Democrats won't win too many elections.