‘Showing up is 80 percent of life.’
by Tom Sullivan
Early voting is underway in North Carolina. Because the NCGOP enjoys jiggering with the next election to keep voters confused after every time it loses a key race, the 2018 election has its own set of confusing features. Voting started on a Wednesday instead of a Thursday. Republicans insisted polls remains open for more hours each day, meaning budgeting for fewer early voting sites. (The extra hours added in the early morning and evening are dead.) Republicans lost a key supreme court seat in 2016 when court races were officially nonpartisan. This year, lo and behold, they are not. There are six constitutional amendments on this year’s ballot. They are the legislative equivalent of clickbait.
As we pored over the daily returns Saturday, a colleague displayed a graph comparing the state’s voting age population against voting participation so far. The image was stark (similar to the population graph above). Younger people have the numbers. Older people do the voting. The population curve skews heavily left (younger). The voter participation curve skews right (older).
Voting and a civic engagement curriculum should be implemented in all schools. #vote pic.twitter.com/ANHM6gtlP7— Ramon Contreras (@_RamonContreras) October 18, 2018
Michelle I. Gao writes in the Harvard Crimson that the fuss over Taylor Swift encouraging young people to “vote based on who most closely represents your values” is misplaced:
Voting is not very exciting. There may be a few interesting swing districts or states, in which the act of voting for a revolutionary candidate would truly be exciting. But most of us cannot participate in those races. For most of us who live in places that lean one way or another, race outcomes are essentially predetermined, and the act of voting itself does not matter much. I confess that I simply expect the gears of democracy to keep turning, regardless of my own civic participation — elections will be held, voters will vote, losers will give up power, and winners will rise in their place.
This is not to say that voting is stupid — on the contrary. Voting may feel mundane, but that voting can feel mundane is the real privilege. People had to fight for this right hundreds of years ago. Women had to fight just a hundred years ago. It is shortsighted and selfish of us not to vote, holding out for something as fickle as excitement.
Not voting is like seeing a $20 bill lying in the gutter and not picking it up. Younger voters have the numbers to make the changes they want to see in this country. They have the power. But they need reach out, take it, and use it. If for no other reason than so many of their elders want them not to.
This year more than any recent election, the mechanisms of voter suppression are more visible than ever. Right out in the open, like posting cops in armbands outside polling places in minority neighborhoods. The Republican president is in on it.
And space alien abduction… which occurs at roughly the same rate. Take your intimidation tactics elsewhere.— Chris Rasure (@ChrisRasure) October 21, 2018
Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman in 2005, apologized to the NAACP for the GOP’s “southern strategy” of heightening racial divisions in the South to its electoral advantage. But the party never abandoned it.
In his infamous 1981 “n*gger, n*gger, n*gger” interview, GOP strategist Lee Atwater confidently declared his would be “the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced.” A couple of generations later, his party has dropped the pretense of dog whistles and taken up vote suppression efforts more sophisticated, more widespread, and more surgically precise than cops in armbands.
Brian Kemp’s voter purges and “exact match” roadblocks to voting in Georgia suggest Atwater’s classic quote has been rewritten:
You start out under Jim Crow with poll taxes and “literacy tests.” By 1968, you can’t do that—that hurts you, illegal. So you say stuff like, uh, voter fraud, photo ID, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about voter roll purges, and all these things you’re talking about are totally administrative things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “Exact match,” is much more abstract than even the ID thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than poll taxes and “literacy tests.”
If we don’t show up to play, we forfeit. Young voters and minority voters have the power if they will pick it up and use it.
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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.