Reply #86: We need to knock on some doors [View All]

Lack of education isn't the only reason for not voting. It is true, empirically, that people with lower levels of formal education vote less than those with more. It's a clear relationship, borne out by years of data: the more years of schooling you have, the more likely you are to vote. This isn't necessarily a causal relationship, however. It could be that people with more schooling earn more and have more at stake in the community. It's also true that voting (and political participation in general) increases as income increases. Also, old people vote at higher rates (until you get to be very, very old indeed, at which point the rates decline due to physical infirmities). We have all kinds of data that enable us to predict who will vote. Often, these things go together, and the effect is cumulative, so that we see poor young people with little education voting at the lowest rates. As Democrats, our challenge is to get typical nonvoters to the polls, which means people who have low levels of education, poor people and young people.

Formal modelers, however, suggest that something else is at work. According to the simple model of voting developed in the 1960's, a person's chance of voting is equal to the benefits they get from voting times the chance that their vote will be the decisive vote, minus any costs associated with voting. According to this model, no one will vote, because the benefits are likely to be small, the chance of casting the deciding vote is very small, and the cost of voting is high (one has to take time away from work, register, be informed of the issues, get to the polling place, stand in line, etc.). Accordingly, this model famously predicts no voting. Countless dissertations have been and will be written about this. (There's also a whole literature on why the US is at the bottom of the industrialized world in voter participation.)

That this ever got so many political scientists worked up says a lot more about political science than anything else, given that we don't observe the predicted nonvoting behavior. At any rate, this model does do something other than to simply assign blame: it enables us to understand why voting is observed at such a low rate, given that the stakes are so high. People don't think they will cast the deciding vote. They are almost always right in this. What individual nonvoters fail to understand, however, is that this is a collective activity. We don't vote as individuals, but as groups. When I fail to vote, assuming someone else will vote for me, I am asking for something for nothing, because I don't want to take the time to vote, but I will seek to enjoy the benefits of having my preferred party/officials in power. Naturally, as Democrats, we resent people who do this, and I'm sure Republicans feel the same way about nonvoters on their side. Anyway, we therefore seek to impose penalties (usually nothing more than our expressed ill will) on nonvoters, hoping to increase the probability that they will vote next time.

We need to do more than that. We know that door to door campaigning works. We need to do that, first to get people registered, second to get them to vote. Political engagement is something that should be taught in school, but encouraging it is also one of the major functions of a political party. As activist democrats, this is the most effective thing we can do. It's more effective than anything we will ever write on DU, it's more effective than any check we can write. We need to be going door to door for our candidates and our party, and we need to do it starting just about now.