Here’s something to keep you up tonight:
Conventional wisdom is that those who stayed home in 2016 cost Hillary Clinton the election and if Democrats can just increase turnout in 2020, they’ll defeat President Donald Trump in November. That assumption is likely wrong.
Report after report has shown that nonvoters nationwide prefer Democrats over Republicans. But new data from the Knight Foundation suggests that if every eligible adult voted in 2020, Democrats would likely increase their popular vote lead from the 2016 presidential election—but still lose the Electoral College.
In the closest battleground states, more nonvoters say they’re likely to support Trump, if they vote, than support the Democratic Party’s nominee. And that could have serious implications for the two major parties’ traditional approaches to getting people to the polls on Election Day.
And that could be true even if the Democrats win a huge popular vote victory.
This is not an argument for low turnout. Everyone should want all people in a democracy to vote. But it’s pretty clear that we don’t have a normal democracy. For a long time, it functioned as one, even with this flawed system. But now we’re starting to see the weaknesses being tested.
The good news in that study for Democrats is that the Republicans are so racist that they are suppressing the vote in states where they are very likely to be disenfranchising their own potential voters. They seem to have assumed that the only people affected are people of color who are more likely to vote for the Democrats. It’s possible that some of those people of color would actually vote for the Republicans but it’s just as likely that they are disenfranchising white non-voters who are sympathetic to them. Oops.
But again, the real problem is the electoral college. The United States should elect the person who gets the most votes, period. We haven’t been a loose confederation of sovereign states for 250 years now. It’s time we voted like a real country.