Democracy Imperiled

Does your vote matter? After the intensely close presidential election of 2000, some people might be inclined to say yes. Others, noting how the conservative majority on the Supreme Court aborted Florida’s vote-counting process, would argue otherwise.

Does your vote matter in the presidential primaries? The candidate who wins the wealth primary--the invisible money chase that takes place before any voting occurs--has gone on to win his party’s nomination every year since 1984. So unless you live in Iowa or New Hampshire, the states where the first two votes are held, your franchise means little during the nomination process.

Should we keep our archaic winner-take-all method of doling out representation, which disenfranchises tens of millions of voters consigned by gerrymandering to live in districts where their parties can never win? Should we keep forcing voters to choose between the lesser of two evils, or should we experiment with preference voting and instant runoffs, which are prevalent in Ireland, France, Australia and elsewhere overseas, and which eliminate the spoiler problem? Why are younger, less educated and working-class people more likely to believe that there are no significant differences between the two major parties, and thus less reason to bother voting? Who benefits from the system now in place, and what will it take to force them to change it?

Alas, Thomas E. Patterson’s thought-provoking “The Vanishing Voter” doesn’t wrestle with any of these issues. Instead, he confines himself to a much narrower question about the presidential selection process surrounding the 2000 election: “What draws people to the campaign and what keeps them away?”

Patterson’s research, which involved weekly polls from November 1999 through the post-election mess, confirms what we already know: Voters are turned off by “too much money, too much theater, too much fighting and too much deception.” The process, he writes, “starts way too early and lasts far too long ... provides too many dull stretches and too few high points, and ... holds out opportunities that often turn out empty.”

To fix it, Patterson calls on the parties to shorten the campaign and give voters of every state a more meaningful vote, ideally by holding a series of single-state primaries in the late spring and concluding the process with a giant “Ultimate Tuesday” national primary a month later. He also calls on the networks to increase their prime-time coverage of the candidates and admonishes the political press to spend less time hyping minor gaffes, the horse race and their own pontifications. Finally, he urges elected officials to adopt some useful reforms, like election day voter registration (which has significantly boosted turnout in the six states that have it, and which Californians will vote on in November).

Patterson’s findings, however, suggest that even some well-intentioned rejiggering of the process will not be enough to bridge the chasm between average voters and the electoral industrial complex.

Consider these nuggets from his book:

* At the start of 2000, two-thirds of the public had no idea which candidates they supported, contrary to the drumbeat of media polls claiming this or that candidate was the front-runner (this is because the media polls forced people to choose between named candidates, while Patterson’s polls allowed voters to say they hadn’t made a firm choice).

* Despite heavy news coverage, half the public didn’t know that Arizona Sen. John McCain beat George W. Bush in New Hampshire. People were so turned off by the race that “by the first convention in 2000

* More people watched the Nixon-Kennedy debates of 1960 than watched the Bush-Gore debates of 2000, even though there were 100 million fewer people then.

* By election day, after more than a year of campaigning and nearly a billion dollars spent, a majority of those surveyed by Patterson flunked a series of 12 questions seeking to ascertain whether they knew the candidates’ positions on prime issues like gun registration, defense spending, tax cuts, abortion, school vouchers, prescription drug coverage, offshore oil drilling and affirmative action.

“The gap between the practitioner and the citizen--despite the intimacy of television and the immediacy of polling--has arguably never been greater,” Patterson writes. “The world occupied by the hundreds at the top and the world populated by the millions at the bottom still overlap at points, but they do so less satisfactorily than before. The juice has been squeezed out of elections.”

But it’s not just the juice that’s gone; the essence of self-government has been eliminated. We the people don’t rule ourselves. Big campaign contributors, big-foot journalists, political incumbents and party leaders set the terms by which the rest of us live. And so people ask themselves why they should bother voting. Today, thanks to the Voting Rights Act and the motor-voter law, most of the legal barriers to individual voter participation have been cleared away. (Though, Patterson reports, America still disenfranchises a stunning 10% of its population, compared with just 2% in the United Kingdom, by taking away ex-felons’ voting rights and prohibiting legal aliens from voting). Education levels, another predictor of citizen involvement, are up, and beginning with the 1960s, women have been turning out at the same pace as men.

But despite all this, voting--the basic act of citizenship--is slowly dying in America. Despite the closeness of the race, only 55% of all eligible adults voted in the presidential election of 2000, compared to 70% in 1960. In off-year elections, only about one-third vote. Voting rates of 10% or less are commonplace in many congressional primaries, and single-digit percentages are no longer a rarity. Most ominous for the future are turnout rates among people younger than 30, which barely hit 30% in 2000.

Would politics be any different if more people voted? Yes, because the active electorate tilts toward older, wealthier and more Republican. Patterson points out that Democrats would be in charge in the White House and on Capitol Hill if all eligible adults voted in 2000. Of course, if politicians expected more people to vote, they would adjust their campaigns accordingly. Still, we could expect somewhat different policy outcomes. Patterson’s Vanishing Voter Project found that likely voters in 2000 were more inclined than nonvoters to spend the federal budget surplus on a tax cut, debt reduction or strengthening Social Security. Nonvoters were more likely to want it spent on health, education and welfare.

Patterson observes that today’s minimum wage (adjusted for inflation) is lower than it was in 1979, that median income has stagnated and that top-dog wealth has soared. Yet these core economic issues, which would undoubtedly motivate millions of disaffected voters, are not pursued with any vigor by the major parties. Why? Start with the fact that business interests give 15 times as much in campaign contributions than labor interests. National Democrats are more beholden to their donors than to their voters.

Then add in the amazing lack of political competition for most offices: Three-quarters of the U.S. House wins re-election by a landslide, one out of seven don’t even have a major party challenger, while more than 40% of state legislative candidates run without major opposition. Why should these political and economic interests stir up more voter engagement when things are so cozy for them now? (To get a better answer than Patterson supplies, turn to Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward’s invaluable “Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way.”)

It’s striking that, in a book focused on vanishing voters, Patterson omits any consideration of Jesse Ventura’s shocking win in Minnesota, where turnout soared thanks in great part to his working-class appeal (along with his inclusion in televised debates, his ability to get significant public financing and election-day voter registration). Patterson also gives scarce mention to other outside-the-box political challenges, like Ross Perot’s in 1992 and Ralph Nader’s in 2000, that demonstrably increased voter interest and participation. He does recognize how real political competition upped turnout during the Bush-McCain battle and in some of the Bush-Gore battleground states in the fall. But his prescriptions fall far short of his diagnosis.

Democracy in America is dying because the incumbent class of both major parties, working in tandem with each other and their funders, consultants and a complaisant press, have figured out how to snuff out real competition. Patterson’s book suggests that, if we want to revive it, we’re going to have to create a truly level playing field for all parties and their candidates with fair treatment by the media, equal access to the ballot, an end to partisan gerrymandering, public funding to free politicians from their dependence on big money, more inclusive debates and more representative ways of counting votes. In a word, we need to apply antitrust thinking to electoral politics. Otherwise, the political market will stay closed, leaving more and more voters little choice but to stay home on election day.