Politicians Embrace Status Quo as Nonvoter Numbers Grow

Running against President Reagan in 1984, Democratic challenger Walter F. Mondale had little reason for hope. But his political director, Michael Ford, saw one longshot option.

“Reagan is unbeatable in the current electorate,” Ford told Mondale. “Our only chance is to change the electorate.”

Ford’s plan? An all-out effort to register 6 million new voters likely to be friendly to the Democratic cause.

But Mondale’s other advisors sneered at the idea as “backward” thinking, Ford recalled recently. They took the money that Ford’s scheme would have cost and put it into television commercials. Then, as now, that was the safe move--but it did nothing at all to arrest Mondale’s descent into a landslide defeat.

No one knows what effect Ford’s scheme would have had on the election. But the rejection of the idea, given Mondale’s desperate circumstances, illustrates that for all the rhetoric to the contrary, there exists a deep-rooted resistance within both parties to expanding the national electorate.

And that attitude goes a long way toward explaining why voter turnout has ominously shrunk over the last 30 years, reaching the point where nonvoters are expected to make up close to two-thirds of the electorate in this fall’s midterm elections.

“People in the business of politics don’t sit down and explicitly say, ‘How can we drive down turnout?’ ” said Ford, a veteran of more than half a dozen Democratic presidential campaigns. “But they won’t do anything to move it the other way.”

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The big reason is risk: the unwillingness to confront the uncertainties that would be created by a changed political environment.

“Politicians who have risen to power in a low-turnout political environment have little to gain and much to fear from an expanded electorate,” said Ben Ginsberg, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist. He said that when officeholders talk about “getting out the vote,” they generally mean their own voters, not the legions of nonparticipants.

In the 1996 presidential election, turnout dropped below 50% of eligible citizens, reaching the lowest level since Calvin Coolidge’s election in 1924. And as this fall’s midterm approaches, professionals in both parties are hard-pressed to find any evidence to suggest a reversal of the downward trend.

What makes this slump all the more disturbing is that it has persisted despite the enactment five years ago of the motor-voter law, designed to ease the burden of voter registration by linking it to the issuance of driver’s licenses.

Some politicians regard the turnout decline with equanimity, even viewing it as evidence of public contentment. “The happier people are, the less likely they are to vote,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, chairman of the Republican Senate campaign committee.

But others dispute that diagnosis, attributing the poor turnout to citizen alienation that began with the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, combined with the sustained crumbling of the two major political parties.

And analysts worry that the low turnout is part of a vicious cycle--the voter apathy and cynicism yield more power to special interests, which in turn makes voters even more cynical and more apathetic.

“Increasingly, parties and leaders are targeting likely voters and don’t give a damn about the whole electorate,” said Curtis Gans, head of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a think tank that studies voting patterns. “As a result, you get a constant narrowing of the electorate.”

With or without the cooperation of politicians, some independent groups are acting to expand the electorate, among them the Southwest Voter Registration Project, which registers Latinos in 15 states, including California.

As has been especially evident in pockets of Southern California, recent moves to restrict the rights of immigrants and cut back on affirmative action programs have boosted the response from Latinos who have lived in the United States legally but never took the step to become citizens, according to the project’s executive director, Lydia Camarillo. “Now [these immigrants] say, ‘The only way we can protect ourselves is by becoming American citizens and registering to vote,’ ” she said.

Still, on Capitol Hill, there seems to be little ardor on either side of the aisle for any protracted effort to spur greater turnout.

Republicans are notably outspoken in their disinterest in the turnout problem. “I don’t think we ought to play to that crowd,” said Rep. John Linder of Georgia, chairman of the House Republican campaign committee, referring to nonvoters.

Instead, Linder said, “we will make an effort to energize our base, and we will make an effort to dispirit [the Democratic] base.”

On the surface, Democrats exhibit more interest in expanding turnout. After all, as their leaders like to point out, it was Democrats who finally pushed the motor-voter measure into law over GOP opposition. And the fact that the ranks of nonvoters are heavily skewed to low-income groups who tend to vote Democratic suggests that the party could gain more from boosting turnout.

But as their leaders concede, the Democratic interest in expanding turnout is limited by the very political system that has shaped their careers. “Democrats have been so caught up by the high cost of campaigns and devoted so much time to fund-raising that they may not have thought enough about how to expand their base,” said Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, chairman of the House Democratic campaign committee.

Like others, Frost puts part of the blame on the ever-increasing use of television, which does little to help turnout because, he said, “it mainly reaches people who are already paying attention to elections.”

Although Frost stresses to Democratic candidates that they should put more effort into grass-roots organizing and less on television, he notes they usually get conflicting advice from their campaign consultants. And many of these consultants may be driven, at least in part, by the profit motive--they generally earn a percentage of what campaigns spend on television spots.

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One consultant who says he is offering different advice is Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition who now is freelancing for Republican candidates. “Television has probably done more to kill voter turnout than anything else in this century,” he said.

Under Reed’s leadership, the Christian Coalition grew into a potent force in GOP politics, largely through grass-roots organizing that took party bigwigs by surprise. Reed said he urges his clients to emulate such approaches. Although it may cut into his media commissions, Reed believes his candidates will gain more votes, and this success will bring him more revenue in the long run.

Most analysts, however, say such efforts won’t pay off unless they are matched by candidates willing to offer compelling messages.

“You need issues that people care about,” said Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor whose Human Serve organization sparked the drive for motor-voter legislation. “Politicians have to be willing to provoke controversy, and that’s what they try not to do.”

Indeed, as Ruy Teixeira, an analyst for the Washington-based liberal think tank Economic Policy Institute, points out: “When you try to put something out there that’s pretty aggressive, forthright and designed to mobilize people, there is always the risk that some people might not like it. If they don’t like it, they might actually swing against you.”

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Shrinking Turnout

Voter turnout in nonpresidential election years hovered close to 50% of eligible voters in the 1960s but now is significantly below that. The most dramatic dip occurred in 1974, linked by analysts to disillusionment stemming from the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, and the turnout has varied little since then.

Percentage of eligible Americans who cast ballots in midterm elections, 1962-94:

38.8% voted in 1994

Who votes? A demographic profile:

Those voting in the midterm elections tended to be older than the population at large, better educated and more well-off, according to Census Bureau survey. There was little difference between the gender and racial makeup of the voters compared with the overall population..

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Overall Voting-Age 1994 Midterm Voters Population By Gender Male 47.5% 47.8% Female 52.5% 52.2% By Race White 88.6% 84.3% Black 9.5% 11.5% By Age 18-24 5.9% 13.2% 25-44 38.2% 43.6% 45-64 33.6% 26.8% 65+ 22.3% 20.7% By Education Less than 8th 4% 7.8% High school/no diploma 6.6% 10.9% High school grad 30.9% 34.1% Some college 29.2% 26.5% Bachelor degree or higher 29.3% 20.7% By Annual Income Under $5,000 1.3% 3.3% $5,000-9,999 2.7% 5.7% $10,000-14,999 5.4% 8% $15,000-24,999 11.9% 14% $25,000-34,999 14.3% 15.1% $35,000-49,999 18.8% 17.6% $50,000-74,999 21.6% 17.1% $75,000 & over 17.6% 12.1% Declined to report 6.4% 7.1%

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