This thread by Yascha Mount of The Atlantic is quite interesting and important for progressives to think about. We simply can’t afford to live in a bubble right now:
Leading progressives say that the key to winning in 2020 is to mobilize nonvoters who are overwhelmingly young, non-white and leftist.
But a new study shows that, on average, nonvoters are actually less progressive than voters.
This is important: With Bernie the presumptive nominee, Dems will stake their chances of beating Trump on the idea that they can mobilize a lot of nonvoters.
As AOC recently said, “The swing voters that we’re most concerned with are the nonvoters to voters.”
So let’s test it.
1) Demographics
As a group, nonvoters really are a little less white than voters. But the difference is way smaller than many assume.
Taken together, blacks and Latinos make up 21% of voters and 28% of nonvoters.
➼ Two out of every three nonvoters are white.
2) Ideology
Nonvoters are way, way less progressive than is commonly believed.
While they are somewhat more liberal on economic policy, where they favor things like a higher minimum wage at somewhat stronger levels, they are markedly more conservative on key cultural issues. mentions Nonvoters are marginally more likely to support, and much less likely to oppose, building a wall on America’s southern border.
Nonvoters are markedly less likely than voters to support giving a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants.
Nonvoters are less likely than voters to support abortion being legal in all or most cases.
And nonvoters are also less likely than voters to support stricter gun laws.
3) Partisan Lean
Given that nonvoters are, on key cultural issues, more conservative than voters, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are also less likely to identify as liberal, to call themselves Democrats, or to think it is urgent to remove Trump from the White House. mentions Only 21% of nonvoters consider themselves liberal.
By contrast, 30% consider themselves moderate and 28% conservative.
Nonvoters are much less likely than voters to have an unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump or the Republican Party than voters.
And nonvoters are less likely than voters to say that the country is on the wrong track, that the 2020 elections are especially important, or that they are set on voting for the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2020.
4) Upshot
A certain kind of centrist projects all his hopes on nonvoters. What they (supposedly) want is “fiscally responsible” economic policies and moderately progressive social policies. That’s a self-serving myth.
But the idea of the progressive nonvoter is just as wrong. mentions There’s a lot of debate about who Dems should nominate. But the question of strategy is just as important: How can the Dems beat Trump?
My two cents:
Any candidate for office, moderate or progressive, is unlikely to win if he stakes his strategy on an imaginary electorate. mentions There are some progressive nonvoters. There are also some devoutly conservative nonvoters.
The idea of mobilizing one group without mobilizing the other is, as Ruy Teixeira told me, “magical pixie dust.” And in 2020, the price of believing in magic may turn out to be very high. mentions Please share my article @TheAtlantic!
And please read the excellent study by the @knightfdn
for yourself!
There is some good evidence that the youth vote may not be as huge as we’d hoped either, at least not so far.
None of this is to say that the Democrats can’t win, be it Sanders or any of the others. But it’s a huge mistake for them to bullshit themselves about the electorate. Donald Trump is a disaster and has never had an approval rating above 45%. There is no reason that the Democrats shouldn’t be able to beat him.
However, his voters are very stoked and he cheats, so he’s more formidable than his numbers show. Democrats can’t win with wishful thinking whether it’s delusions from the center or the left. They need to deal with reality and strategize based upon factual information.