We have an extremely critical demographic that sheds light on non-voters – voter participation runs parallel to income. Voters living in households with annual incomes of at least $125K cast ballots at rates roughly twice as high as those inhabiting households with annual incomes below $25K. Voting quietly gauges disenfranchisement. Poverty leverages such powerful guidance to electoral habits that the entire nation has been pockmarked with participatory dead zones.
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Here is a fun fact: the 2014 midterms – halfway through Barack Obama’s final term – featured a landslide vote for “Nobody.” 63% of national voters mailed in their ballots for “Nobody,” AKA “America’s eternally winning candidate.” Was this a referendum on the mass disappointment that people experienced when the promise of Obama never arrived? Or do low voter turnouts reflect something deeply amiss in our national mindset – a lingering, persistent sense that, as George Carlin quipped about political elites, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”
Here is a big secret – poor people, among others, don’t generally imagine that political candidates care about them. I spent 35 years of my life working with poor folks in my underpaid position as an outreach mental health worker in Franklin County, Massachusetts. I sat at kitchen tables in Section 8 apartments and rested on tree stumps next to tent encampments. People responded to my question – “are you registered to vote?” – with a waiting question of their own – “what’s the point?” A piercing stare usually accompanied that question – “what’s the point?” It’s an ambushing query that one ought to be expecting, but it caught me off-guard. When you talk about voting with poor people you often get the queasy feeling that you have drifted into an unfamiliar world filled with people who have suffered injuries that you can only gropingly visualize. These people gazed at me with a sort of benevolent pity.
City Council meetings are open to any member of the public, and one notes that they transpire in a ritualized manner, full of procedural rules and arcane formalities. These affairs unfold with parallel dimension dreaminess. Nothing smacks of urgency. Issues are tabled, deferred, postponed and forgotten. In my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, every city council meeting begins with a ritual called “Public Comments.” Anyone can sign up to read or improvise a timed statement that will be abruptly ended at the stroke of two minutes. Across the years no one that I know recalls an “official” response of any sort to a public comment. Never. It is a ritual designed to pretend that ordinary citizens have a voice. In reality, the ritual conveys the opposite. Nothing moves the heavy aura of formal indifference. Poor people live lives of deferred urgency. Politics unfolds in a timeless space of controlled, evasive deliberation.
Studies show that in US elections with unusually high turnout, affluent people turn out in higher-than-usual numbers. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral election, hailed as a model of high voter turnout, featured a 52% majority voting for “Nobody.” Contrary to popular belief, Mamdani’s candidacy did not bring poor disenfranchised voters into the public arena. His most avid support came from gentrified Brooklyn neighborhoods with multimillion dollar brownstones. We should applaud the people who voted for him, but the system remains broken.
“Nobody” will win by a landslide in tomorrow’s election – as they always have. I predict that with no risk of being wrong. Of course I don’t blame the suffering, forgotten people – the disenfranchised tens of millions of people whose roofs and walls tilt in the winds of uncertainty. The US electoral system has eliminated these people via the age old tactic of turning a deaf ear toward the pain of “those closest to the struggle.”
Here are two more fun facts to consider: 1) roughly half of all homeless folks (use “unhoused” if you prefer) have grown up in foster care – the governmental institution that prepares children by the hundreds of thousands to be jettisoned from society with little material or emotional support. 2) Half of the members of congress hold Ivy League diplomas. Bluntly stated – the foster care system creates non-participants and the Ivy League trains leaders. US political structures follow societal design.
The systemic characteristics of the US electoral system require little in the way of rocket-science training to comprehend. The disenfranchised segment of the voting public creates a huge void, a sucking vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum. Fascism occupies the gaping hole in our electoral system.
The solution is both glaringly obvious and maddeningly difficult – the impoverished masses have to attain a real political platform. Poor candidates must be given financial support and promotion. Is there a passion within the Democratic Party to undertake this heroic effort? If there is, I have not seen it. I believe that this country cannot be saved from collapse without an-as-yet- unmobilized movement to bring power and agency to the poorest people – the tens of millions who do not participate in our national or local politics. They do not participate as voters, as office holders, as organized resistors and as the conscience of the republic.
I will be with all the other active voters on Tuesday, November, 3. On Wednesday, the real work begins.
