AK

There are a number of things that contribute to this low turnout. Presidential elections have their own particular set of issues. The electoral college, for one thing. Most people know that their vote doesn’t matter anyway so they don’t vote.

The deeper problem is the one you pointed to: turnout in primaries and turnout in off-year elections. I was actually pleasantly surprised in 2018 that turnout went up to 53 percent. The norm in off-year elections has been about 35 percent turnout for decades. A lot of that has been formed, for one thing, by the lack of competition in many areas so that the outcome is considered preordained.

Since World War II, the American people have, in some broad way, gone through a long period of thinking that it didn’t matter a whole lot who was in office. The economy was prosperous. Among poor people — or relatively poor people and relatively less educated people — voting didn’t seem to matter much. Voter turnout is not just an aggregate number. The figures that strike me most are the ones that show that turnout is correlated with education and income. The better educated you are, the more well off you are, the more likely you are to vote. Turnout is extremely low among poor people.

We’re in a period of transition. The move of the Republican Party to the extreme right in the last twenty years is shifting that sense of whether it matters or not. The 2018 elections may have been the first fruits of that. But even still, here I am talking about the glorious turnout somewhere in the 50 percent range. [laughs] Our turnout is extremely low and most people don’t bother, and the major political parties, until quite recently, have collaborated and participated in keeping turnout low.