I’ve lost interest in voting.
—twenty-six-year-old Pennsylvania voter1
I just don’t vote.
—twenty-five-year-old North Carolina resident2
I don’t have any time, and I’m not interested anyway.
—forty-year-old Washington resident3
I don’t see any reason to vote.
—thirty-year-old Wisconsin resident4
SAM ROBERTS, a Miami resident, was kicking himself. A Gore supporter, he had not voted in the 2000 presidential election. “I should have voted,” Roberts told a reporter. “Had planned to but didn’t get around to it. Dumb.”5
With the outcome of the 2000 election hanging by the thread of a few hundred votes in Florida, citizen regret was widespread. Nearly half of adult Americans had not voted, and a CNN poll indicated most of them wished they had.6
Even if more people go to the polls in the next election, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, could have that effect, the long-term prospects are anything but bright. The voting rate has fallen in nearly every presidential election for four decades. An economic recession and Ross Perot’s spirited third-party bid sparked a healthy 5 percent increase in 1992, but turnout in 1996 plunged to 49 percent, the first time since the 1920s that it had slipped below 50 percent.
Many expected turnout to rise in 2000. The Clinton-Dole race four years earlier was one-sided from the start. The contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush, however, looked to be the tightest since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won by the slim margin of 100,000 votes. “Close elections tend to drive up voter interest,” said CNN’s political analyst Bill Schneider.7 Turnout did rise, but only slightly: a mere 51 percent of U.S. adults voted in 2000.
That was a far cry from the 63 percent turnout for the Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960, which became the benchmark for evaluating participation in subsequent elections. In every presidential election for the next twenty years, turnout fell. It rose by 1 percentage point in 1984, but then dropped 3 points in 1988. Analysts viewed the trend with alarm, but the warning bells really sounded in 1996, when more Americans stayed home than went to the polls on Election Day. In 1960, 68.8 million adults voted and 40.8 million did not. In 1996, 96.3 million came out and 100.2 million passed.8
The turnout trend in the midterm congressional elections has been no less alarming. The voting rate was nearly 50 percent on average in the 1960s, barely stayed above 40 percent in the 1970s, and has averaged 37 percent since then. After a recent midterm vote the cartoonist Rigby showed an election clerk eagerly asking a stray cat that had wandered into a polling place, “Are you registered?”
The period from 1960 to 2000 marks the longest ebb in turnout in the nation’s history. If in 2000, as in 1960, 63 percent of the electorate had participated, nearly 25 million more people would have voted. If that many queued up at a polling booth in New York City, the line would stretch all the way to Los Angeles and back, twice over.
Fewer voters are not the only sign that Americans are less interested in political campaigns. Since 1960, participation has declined in virtually every area of election activity, from the volunteers who work on campaigns to the viewers who watch televised debates. The United States had 100 million fewer people in 1960 than it did in 2000 but, even so, more viewers tuned to the October presidential debates in 1960 than did so in 2000.
Few today pay even token tribute to presidential elections. In 1974, Congress established a fund to underwrite candidates’ campaigns, financed by a checkoff box on personal income tax returns that allowed citizens to assign $1 (later raised to $3) of their tax liability to the fund. Initially, one in three taxpayers checked the box. By the late 1980s, only one in five marked it. Now, only one in eight does so.9
What could possibly explain such trends? Why are citizens drawing back from election politics? Why is the voter vanishing?
American politics has many strange aspects, but few so mysterious as the decline in electoral participation. Two decades ago, the political scientist Richard Brody observed that the declining rate was at odds with existing theories about voting behavior.10
One such theory held that rising education levels would spawn higher participation.11 In 1960, college-educated Americans were 50 percent more likely to vote than those who had not finished high school. With college graduates increasing steadily in number, the future of voting in America looked bright. “Education not only tends to imbue persons with a sense of citizen duty, it also propels them into political activity,” the political scientist V. O. Key wrote.12 In 1960, half of the adult population had not finished high school and fewer than 10 percent had graduated from college. Today, 25 percent hold a college degree and another 25 percent have attended college. Yet, turnout has declined.
The voting rate of African Americans deepens the mystery. In 1960, only 29 percent of southern blacks were registered to vote.13 An imposing array of barriers—poll taxes, rigged literacy tests, and courthouse intimidation—kept them from registering. Jim Crow laws ruled southern politics, as did segregationist appeals. Ross Barnett was elected Mississippi’s governor in 1959 to the tune of a race-baiting song that included a line saying he would oppose integration with forceful intent. When George Wallace first ran for governor of Alabama, he was beaten by an out-and-out racist candidate, prompting Wallace to vow: “I’ll never be outniggered again.” He kept his word and won handily when he ran in 1962. Only 22,000 of Mississippi’s 450,000 blacks—a mere 5 percent—were registered to vote.14 North Carolina had the South’s highest level of black registration but, even there, only 38 percent were enrolled.15
The force of the civil rights movement swept the registration barriers aside. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, prohibits states from requiring citizens to pay “any poll tax or other tax” before they can vote in federal elections. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 empowered the U.S. attorney general to send federal examiners to supervise registration in the seven southern states where literacy tests had been imposed and where fewer than 50 percent of eligible adults were registered. Within half a year, black registration in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina rose by 40 percent.16 The Voting Rights Act also suspended the use of literacy tests, which were banned completely five years later. President Lyndon Johnson told southern officials not to resist electoral change: “To those who seek to avoid action by their National Government in their own communities, who want to and seek to maintain purely local control over elections, the answer is simple: open your polling places to all your people.”17
Many southern blacks saw their names on polling lists for the first time in their lives. African-American registration rose to 43 percent in 1964 and to more than 60 percent by 1970.18 In the process, black turnout in the region doubled. Southern whites reacted by also voting in larger numbers, mostly for racial conservatives.19 In 1960, participation in the South was 30 percentage points below that of the rest of the country. Today, it is less than 5 points lower. Nationally, the voting rate of African Americans is now nearly the same as that of whites. Why, then, has the overall rate declined?
The women’s vote adds to the mystery. Although women gained the right to vote in 1920, they were slow to exercise it. Even as late as 1960, turnout among women was nearly 10 percentage points below that of men.20 American society was changing, however. The tradition-minded women born before suffrage were giving way to generations of women who never doubted that the vote belonged to them as much as it did to men. Today, women vote at the same rate as men. But the overall rate has fallen.
The relaxation of registration laws in recent years also provides reason to think that the turnout rate should have gone up, not down. Unlike Europe, where governments take responsibility to get citizens registered and where participation exceeds 80 percent, the United States places the burden of registration on the individual.21 For a long period, this arrangement was a boon to officials who wanted to keep the poor and uneducated from voting. States devised schemes that hampered all but the stable homeowner. In most states, residents had to live at the same address for as long as a year before they were eligible to register, and had to re-register if they moved only a few doors away. Registration offices were open for limited hours and were sometimes located at inconvenient or hard-to-find places. Many states closed their rolls a year before an election. By the time people got around to thinking about going to the polls, the deadline had long since passed. Many districts were also quick to purge the rolls of nonvoters, requiring them to re-register if they wanted to exercise their right to vote.
For years, the League of Women Voters sought to persuade Congress and the states to reduce registration barriers.22 Many scholars also believed that registration reform was the answer to the turnout problem. Studies indicated that participation among America’s registered voters was nearly identical to that of European voters.23 The political scientists Raymond Wolfinger and Steven Rosenstone estimated that eased registration requirements could boost presidential election turnout by as much as 9 percent.24
Registration laws have been relaxed. No state today is allowed to impose a residency requirement that exceeds thirty days for a federal election. Six states—Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—allow residents to register at the polls on Election Day25 The Motor Voter Act, passed by Congress in 1993, has even shifted some of the registration burden to the states. They must offer registration to citizens who seek services at public assistance agencies, such as food stamp and Medicare offices, or who apply for driver’s licenses. States can also offer registration at unemployment offices and other public facilities, such as libraries and schools. Moreover, the act requires states to allow registration by mail and prohibits them from arbitrarily purging nonvoters from the rolls.
Millions of Americans have enrolled through the Motor Voter Act. Most of them would have registered anyway under the old system, but the Federal Election Commission estimates that the legislation has added at least 10 million registrants to the rolls since 1993.26 With so many additional registrants, why did turnout drop by 5 million voters between 1992 and 2000?
The political scientists Michael McDonald and Samuel Popkin claim that the turnout decline is a “myth.” “There is no downward trend [since 1972] in the national turnout rate,” they say.27 Their argument is built on the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau bases its official turnout figures on the total adult population. This population includes individuals who are ineligible to vote, including noncitizens, prison inmates, and convicted felons.* Their numbers have increased substantially since 1960. As a result of liberalized immigration laws, the United States in recent decades has experienced its largest influx of immigrants since World War I.28 Noncitizens were 2 percent of the adult population in 1960 and today account for 7 percent.29 Tougher drug and sentencing laws have also increased the number of ineligible voters. The nation now has a higher percentage of its population behind bars than any other country in the world.30 Roughly 3.5 million are disqualified from voting because they are incarcerated or a convicted felon. This is a sizeable increase from 1960, when fewer than 500,000 were ineligible to vote for these reasons.31
When voting rates are adjusted for ineligible adults, the picture improves. Between 1960 and 2000 turnout among eligible voters declined by 9 points (from 64 to 55 percent), compared with the Census Bureau’s population-based figure of 12 points (63 to 51 percent). Even by this revised estimate, however, the voting rate is disturbingly low. If turnout in 2000 had been 9 points higher, 18 million more Americans would have gone to the polls—a number equal to the combined turnout in the twenty-four states of Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. By any measure, that’s a lot of missing voters.
The revised figures, however, reveal a potentially significant pattern. The decline among eligible voters is concentrated between 1960 and 1972. Since then, turnout among eligible voters in both the presidential and the congressional midterm elections has fallen only slightly, leading McDonald and Popkin to conclude that the appearance of steadily declining turnout is “an illusion.”32 If they are right, concern about electoral participation is overstated. There would still be the puzzling question of why the gains in education and registration have not produced the 15–20 percent rise in turnout that voting theories would have predicted.33 However, fears that the participation problem might worsen would seem unfounded.
Unfortunately, a closer look at turnout trends—and, as will be evident later in this chapter, other participation trends—indicates that the flight from electoral politics is not illusory. For one, disenfranchised citizens in 1960 were not limited to noncitizens, prison inmates, and convicted felons. Southern blacks may in theory have been eligible to vote, but most of them were effectively barred from participating, as were the many poor southern whites who could not afford the poll tax or pass a literacy test. Thus, the clearest picture of what’s been happening with turnout in recent decades emerges from a look at nonsouthern states only. There, turnout among eligible voters exceeded 70 percent in 1960.34 By 1972, it had dropped to 60 percent, and, in 1996, barely topped 50 percent. The non-South voting rate is now near the level of the 1820s, a time when many eligible voters could not read or write and had to travel by foot or on horseback for hours to get to the nearest polling place.35
Since the 1970s voting rates have also fallen in presidential primaries. Nearly 30 percent of adults in states with presidential primaries voted in these contests in 1972 and 1976.36 Since then, the primary election turnout has fallen sharply. It was just 17 percent in the 2000 presidential primaries and 13 percent in 1996 (when only the Republicans had a contested race).
Turnout in congressional primaries has also been on a downward trajectory. It fell from 30 percent in 1970 to 20 percent in 1986. Since then, the average has been closer to 15 percent.
Voting rates for statewide and local elections are not readily available, but fragmentary evidence points to a sharp decline here as well. In Connecticut, for example, turnout in municipal elections fell from 53 to 43 percent between 1989 and 1997.37 After surveying a number of states and cities, Jack Doppelt and Ellen Shearer concluded in 1999 that turnout had become “an embarrassment.” They reported no locations where voting numbers had risen significantly and plenty where the numbers had dropped to historic lows. For example, the combined turnout for two statewide 1998 Texas primaries, a regular one and a runoff election, was 14 percent of registered voters. Only 3 percent showed up for the runoff.38
The first elections after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did not disrupt the trend. In the two highest-profile statewide races—those for governor in Virginia and in New Jersey—turnout fell from its level four years earlier. It dropped by 5 percentage points in Virginia and by 10 points in New Jersey. Even in New York State, where residents had been urged to come out in local elections in order to show the world that democracy was stronger than ever, voting was down. Syracuse had its lowest turnout in seventy-six years, Binghamton its lowest in thirty years, and Buffalo apparently its lowest ever. Even in New York City, only 36 percent of registered voters (about 25 percent of the adult population) went to the polls.39
It is too early to know the impact that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks will have on political involvement. Americans might stage a triumphant return to the polls in upcoming elections. But any claim that their interest in voting has not flagged since the 1970s is based on incomplete evidence.
Does a diminished appetite for voting affect the health of American politics? Is society harmed when the voting rate is low or in decline? As the Chicago Tribune said in an editorial, it may be “humiliating” that the United States, the oldest continuous democracy, has nearly the lowest voting rate in the world.40 But does it have any practical significance?
Some observers take comfort in low-turnout elections. They say the country is better off if less interested and less knowledgeable citizens stay home on Election Day. In a 1997 cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, Robert Kaplan wrote that “apathy, after all, often means that the political situation is healthy enough to be ignored. The last thing America needs is more voters—particularly badly educated and alienated ones—with a passion for politics.”41
The gist of this age-old argument is that low turnout protects society from erratic or even dangerous shifts in public opinion. Irregular voters are not as well informed as habitual voters and are therefore more likely to get carried away by momentary passions. If these voters participate heavily, it is argued, outcomes could vary greatly from one election to the next, resulting in disruptive policy shifts. In his essay “In Defense of Nonvoting,” the columnist George Will says “good government” rather than voting is “the fundamental human right.” He notes that high turnout and massive vote swings contributed to the political chaos that brought down Germany’s Weimar Republic, enabling the Nazis to seize power.42 Will claims that America’s declining voting rate is a healthy development.
America’s voters, however, have not acted whimsically. Except for an interlude in the 1780s, when the Articles of Confederation governed the United States, erratic voting has not been a persistent source of political instability.
America’s voters have typically recoiled at the prospect of radical change.43 William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech enthralled the 1896 Democratic convention delegates, but his nomination prompted large numbers of swing voters to abandon the Democratic Party in fear of free coinage of silver.44 “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” blared an anti-Bryan editorial in the Chicago Tribune.45 When Barry Gold-water, the Republican nominee in 1964, exclaimed that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” he got buried in one of the greatest landslides in presidential history. Hard-core Republicans backed him, but other voters went sharply in the other direction. Eight years later, the Democratic nominee, George McGovern, took positions on Vietnam and income security that alarmed many, and he lost both the election and the swing vote by even wider margins than Goldwater.
Small and obstinate electorates rather than large and whimsical ones have been America’s affliction. During the South’s Jim Crow era, low-turnout, whites-only elections helped sustain segregation. Even today, electoral dysfunction typically stems from small electorates. As turnout in recent congressional primaries declined, hard-core partisans (the “wing nuts”) became an increasingly larger proportion of those voting, which contributed to the more frequent defeat of moderate candidates. In turn, Congress became a more divided and rancorous institution.
U.S. elections are hardly at a crisis point. Swing voters still decide the outcome of national elections, and the drop in turnout has not threatened the legitimacy of elected officials. Nevertheless, elections are now less adaptive. As electorates shrink, they tend to calcify. If huge shifts in the vote are antithetical to sound government, so, too, are tiny ones. They signal a polity with a reduced capacity to respond to changing needs.
Elections have also become less representative. Politics is prone to what the political scientists Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry Brady call “participatory distortion.” Citizens of higher income, education, and age are greatly overrepresented in nearly every political activity, from contacting legislators to contributing money. Voting is the least distorted activity46 For a long period, in fact, election analysts claimed that turnout was irrelevant because voters and nonvoters thought alike.47 “Most electoral outcomes,” Ruy Teixeira concluded in 1992, “are not determined in any meaningful way by turnout.”48
This argument is still heard, but the evidence for it is less convincing than it was even a decade ago.49 Who votes does matter. As the electorate has shrunk, it has come to include proportionally more citizens who are older, who have higher incomes, or who hold intense opinions on such issues as gun control, labor rights, and abortion. On balance, these tendencies have worked slightly to the Republicans’ advantage,50 which, in close races, can tip the balance. Polls indicated that if all eligible adults had voted in 2000, the Democrats would have captured the presidency and both houses of Congress.51 Turnout also affected the outcome of the 1994 midterm election that launched the “Republican Revolution” in Congress. Surveys showed that nonvoters preferred Democratic congressional candidates by a substantial margin.52
If turnout among those of lower education and income were substantially higher, the GOP would not necessarily have lost the 1994 and 2000 elections. Republican candidates would run on broader platforms if more people voted regularly. So, too, would Democratic candidates, who have increasingly directed their appeals at special interests and higher-income voters. Campaign platforms have always been tailored to those who vote.53 As the political scientists Steven Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen note: “The idle go unheard: They do not speak up, define the agenda, frame the issues, or affect the choices leaders make.”54
The increasing number of nonvoters could be a danger to democracy. Although high participation by itself does not trigger radical change, a flood of new voters into the electorate could possibly do it. It’s difficult to imagine a crisis big and divisive enough to prompt millions of new voters to suddenly flock to the polls, especially in light of Americans’ aversion to political extremism. Nevertheless, citizens who are outside the electorate are less attached to the existing system. As the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observed, a society of nonvoters “is potentially more explosive than one in which most citizens are regularly involved in activities which give them some sense of participation in decisions which affect their lives.”55
Voting can strengthen citizenship in other ways, too.56 When people vote, they are more attentive to politics and are better informed about issues affecting them. Voting also deepens community involvement, as the philosopher John Stuart Mill theorized a century ago.57 Studies indicate that voters are more active in community affairs than non-voters are. Of course, this association says more about the type of person who votes as opposed to the effect of voting. But recent evidence, as Harvard University’s Robert Putnam notes, “suggests that the act of voting itself encourages volunteering and other forms of good citizenship.”58
Going to the local polling place and voting does not require a lot of time. In most locations, it takes about as long to drive to a video store and rent a couple of movies. Other forms of electoral participation, such as canvassing or paying careful attention to election news, can be far more time consuming. How involved are citizens in these more demanding forms of participation?
When it comes to joining groups or helping in campaigns, Americans have a stronger tradition of participation than Europeans.59 Since the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the United States has been admired for its political activism. “A nation of joiners” was Tocqueville’s characterization of the United States. But it is losing this distinction in election campaigns. Millions still put bumper stickers on their cars, wear campaign buttons, display lawn signs, attend campaign rallies, or work on a campaign, but their numbers are falling. In 1972, 12 percent of Americans attended a campaign rally or speech and more than 6 percent worked for a party or candidate. By the 1980s, citizens were a third less likely to engage in these activities and, today, are only half as likely60 The number who contribute money to a candidate or party has also decreased by nearly 50 percent since the 1970s.61
Attention to election news has also declined. Campaign coverage has never been more plentiful, or so widely ignored. In 1960, nearly 50 percent claimed to have watched a “good many” election programs. That figure has fallen to fewer than 30 percent. Attention to newspaper coverage of campaigns has decreased even more sharply62
Although they are still a major attraction, even the October presidential debates get less attention than before. Except for the Super Bowl, the Summer Olympics, and the Academy Awards, the debates are the most watched events on television. Like those other contests, the debates are, as Alan Schroeder writes, “human drama at its rawest.”63 Conflict, risk, and suspense are all elements of drama, and the debates offer them on a level unmatched by other campaign events.64 They have regularly produced surprising performances. Ronald Reagan demonstrated an unexpected command of the issues in 1980 and, just as unexpectedly, addled his way through a 1984 debate, concluding his performance with a time-capsule anecdote to which he forgot the ending.
Although the October debates still attract tens of millions of viewers, the numbers have been falling steadily. The four Kennedy-Nixon debates each attracted roughly 60 percent of all households with television sets.65 When debates resumed with Carter and Ford in 1976, viewers again flocked to their TVs, as they also did for the single Reagan-Carter face-off in 1980. Since then, except for the Clinton-Bush-Perot encounters in 1992, debate audiences have been declining. Only 46 percent of the country’s television households watched the two Reagan-Mondale debates in 1984. Barely more than 36 percent saw the Bush-Dukakis debates in 1988. The Clinton-Dole debates in 1996 averaged 29 percent.
The debate audiences in 2000 were widely expected to exceed that level. The Bush-Gore contest was much tighter than the Clinton-Dole race, and large numbers of voters had not yet settled on a candidate. “In just thirty-five days, Americans will choose a new president,” said CBS’s Dan Rather on the night of the first debate. “What’s about to happen … could have a big impact on whether it will be Democrat Al Gore or Republican George Bush.… [T]he race is tight.”66 Yet, the audience rating for the three Bush-Gore debates was no higher than for the three Clinton-Dole debates. The third debate in 2000 had a 26 percent rating—the lowest ever.
The audiences for primary election debates are also shrinking. Large numbers of Americans saw Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy face off in 1968 and watched Hubert Humphrey and McGovern debate in 1972. The 1980 Republican debate in New Hampshire that thrust Ronald Reagan back into the lead for the GOP nomination also attracted a sizeable audience. In contrast, the two dozen primary debates in 2000 drew, on average, 1.8 million viewers— about a fifth of the audience of the typical prime-time program. None of these debates attracted even as many as 5 million viewers. If the debates had been a new television series, they would have been cancelled after the initial episode. The first Democratic debate in 2000 went head-to-head with a World Wrestling Federation match: the wrestlers had four times as many viewers as the candidates. Even then, WWF’s SmackDown! with 7.2 million viewers was rated ninety-first among the week’s television shows.67
The convention audience is also dwindling. At one time, Americans could hardly get their fill of the televised national party conventions. They were so popular that they became even a marketing tool. “Buy a television, watch the conventions,” suggested a 1952 RCA ad. Another RCA ad said: “With the aid of television, we had what amounted to the greatest town meeting ever held.… Sixty million people had front-row seats and got a better picture of what was going on than any delegate or any reporter on the convention floor.”68
In 1952, the typical television household watched 25 hours of convention coverage, often in the company of friends and neighbors.69 Even as late as 1976, the typical household viewed the conventions for 11 hours. Since then the ratings have hit the skids. By 1996, the average had fallen to less than 4 hours. A new low was reached in 2000: 3 hours of convention viewing for the typical household. In 1976, 28 percent of television households had their sets on and tuned at any given moment to the convention coverage. Only 13 percent were watching in 2000, down from 17 percent in 1996.70
Throughout the 2000 campaign, as part of our Vanishing Voter Project, we monitored Americans’ attention to the campaign through weekly national surveys. By the time Election Day arrived, we had conducted 80,000 interviews in fifty-two weeks, the most comprehensive study ever conducted of election interest. Our polls paint a disturbing picture of involvement in the world’s foremost democracy. During the typical week, four times as many respondents said they were paying “just some,” “only a little,” or “no” attention to the campaign as said they were paying “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention.
The 2000 election was slow to engage Americans. By Thanksgiving 1999, the candidates had been campaigning nonstop for two months, and four primary debates had already been held. Nevertheless, the campaign might just as well have been taking place in Siberia. Americans sat around their holiday dinner tables talking about everything but George Bush, John McCain, Bill Bradley, and Al Gore. Only one in twenty adults reported having talked about the campaign on Thanksgiving Day—and that included conversations of any length with anybody, not just extended discussions with family members over turkey and trimmings.71
Interest rose during the period of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and it continued to grow through early March’s decisive Super Tuesday primaries, fueled in part by McCain’s drawing power. The number who said they were paying close attention nearly doubled. Even then, many were tuned out. In the week after New Hampshire’s GOP primary, only 47 percent could name McCain as the winner. Four percent claimed Bush had won, and 49 percent said they did not know.
After Super Tuesday, interest dropped sharply. By the end of April, three in four said they were paying almost no attention to the campaign. Americans were so uninvolved during the late-spring and early-summer months that many forgot some of what they had learned about the candidates’ policy positions earlier in the campaign.72
Not until the August conventions did people again start to pay closer attention. The news that Gore had selected Joseph Lieberman as his running mate—the first Jewish candidate to run on a major-party ticket—was known to 66 percent of Americans within forty-eight hours of the announcement.73 The October debates also sparked interest, as did the news four days before the election that Bush had been arrested in 1976 for driving while intoxicated. Within a day, 75 percent were aware of the incident.74 But these were unusual moments. In only two weeks out of fifty-two did the number of adults who said they were paying “very close” or “quite a bit of” attention reach 40 percent.
An inattentive public is an uninformed one. As the 2000 campaign entered its final week, only one issue position—Gore’s stand on prescription drugs—was familiar to a majority of Americans.* During the past half century there has been a revolution in higher education and in mass communication. Citizens have never had so much information available to them or been better equipped to handle it. Research indicates, however, that Americans today are no better informed about election politics than they were fifty years ago.75 The high school-educated public of 1948 knew as much about Harry Truman’s and Thomas Dewey’s positions on price controls and the Taft-Hartley Act as the media-saturated, college-educated public of 2000 knew about Gore’s and Bush’s stands on prescription drugs and tax cuts.76
Ironically, it was not until after Election Day that the public became keenly interested in the 2000 campaign. The unfolding drama in Florida captured imaginations in a way that the campaign itself never did. Interest had peaked just before Election Day when 46 percent were paying “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention. During the following week, as it became clear that the Florida vote would decide the outcome, nearly 80 percent were paying close attention. For a period, a majority acted as if election politics really mattered, talking about it with interest, and absorbing each new twist in the Florida vote count.77
Except for the black community and some die-hard partisans, however, the Florida wrangling was cause for neither anger nor anxiety. Citizens were captivated by the story but not wedded to the result. Only 10 percent believed the situation was “a constitutional crisis” and, within two weeks, half said the dispute had “gone on too long already.”78 The public’s response was a stark contrast to how Americans had reacted in 1876, the last time a president was chosen by postelection wheeling and dealing. Then they had taken to the streets, and more than a few fistfights broke out. Wider civil unrest was averted only when a political deal was brokered to end the Civil War Reconstruction. Nothing remotely like that was required to keep the peace in 2000. “There will be no mobs gathering to shout ‘Gore or blood’ or ‘Bush or blood,’” the New York Times’s Adam Clymer wrote. “Nobody cares that much.”79
What is going on here? Why are Americans less engaged by political campaigns today than a few decades ago? And is the situation likely to change anytime soon?
Some commentators say participation follows a natural cycle and will rise again soon, just as it did after downturns in the 1890s, 1920s, and 1940s. “Historians will almost certainly remember our time,” says the Boston Globe’s David Shribman, “as the preface to a new period of political activism, agitation, and passion.”80
But this argument overlooks the persistence of the current trend and the special nature of those earlier periods. Turnout dropped sharply in the 1890s before stabilizing a few elections later. That era, however, was defined by deliberate efforts to suppress voting.81 Democratic-controlled southern legislatures used poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause in order to prevent African Americans from registering. “The costs of voting were deliberately made so high,” writes the political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, “that probably half of the white electorate was effectively disenfranchised along with almost all of the [blacks].”82
Turnout in the South was 65 percent in the 1880s. By the early 1900s, it had fallen to 30 percent. In the North, Republican-controlled legislatures imposed registration requirements only on big-city residents, most of whom were working-class Democrats. The ballot fraud perpetrated by urban political machines declined as a result but so did the voting rate of eligible voters.83
Turnout also fell sharply in the 1920s, the first decade in which women were allowed to vote. Men had long been out of arguments for keeping the vote from women. Senator Wendell Phillips had said in 1898: “One of two things is true: either woman is like man—and if she is, then a ballot based on brains belongs to her as well as to him. Or she is different, and then man does not know how to vote for her as she herself does.”84 Finally, in 1920, ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment gave women what they had been seeking for decades.
Nevertheless, women were slow to take advantage of suffrage,85 and the overall turnout rate fell sharply. Turnout had been 62 percent in 1916.86 It was a mere 49 percent in 1920. In Illinois, the only state where ballots for the two sexes were counted separately, women’s voting rate in 1920 was 27 percentage points lower than that of men. “It was not to be expected that the adult women who suddenly find themselves in possession of the franchise should be as conscientious in its exercise as men who from childhood had been encouraged to think politically,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger and Erik McKinley Eriksson in “The Vanishing Voter,” a 1924 article in The New Republic.87
Turnout also fell sharply in 1944 and 1948, but, in this case, too, there were special circumstances: world war and its aftermath. In Britain as well as in the United States, people were so preoccupied by the war effort that partisan politics was a secondary concern. No analyst has fully explained why this had to be the case or why the wartime governing parties in both England and the United States suffered stinging defeats in postwar legislative elections. By the 1950s, voting rates in Britain and America had returned to normal. Except for 1944 and 1948, turnout was near or above 60 percent in every U.S. presidential election between 1936 and 1968.
The recent downturn in voting has lasted longer than the earlier ones and has occurred despite the upward pressure of advances in education, registration, and civil rights. The latest period does not closely resemble any past period, and there is no end clearly in sight. What might possibly explain it?
Politics has had to compete with more things for people’s time and attention. Life today offers distractions on a scale unimaginable even a few decades ago, not only from cable television and the Internet but also in career and lifestyle choices. This development has been felt in European democracies as well, which have also experienced declining participation rates, although on a much smaller scale than in the United States.
The decline is also attributable in part to the march of time. The civic-minded generation raised during the Depression and the Second World War has been gradually replaced by the more private-minded X and Y generations that lived through childhood and adolescence without having experienced a great national crisis.88 Today’s young adults are less politically interested and informed than any cohort of young people on record.89 The voting rate of adults under thirty was 50 percent in 1972. It was barely above 30 percent in 2000.
The participation decline, however, is not due entirely to generational replacement. Changes in the electoral system, political parties, the news media, and the conduct of campaigns—many of which are the consequence of deliberate policy choices—have contributed to the decrease in turnout and involvement. An explanation of these developments is the focus of this book, which will also offer a few modest suggestions on what might be done to address the problem.
For one, the electoral system needs fixing. Although the Florida debacle in 2000 revealed defects in how ballots are cast and counted, the participation problem does not reside at the tail end of the campaign. What happened to ballots in Florida and elsewhere is an inexcusable failure of election officials to safeguard the integrity of the vote. Nevertheless, because Americans were not aware of the problem until after Election Day, it cannot possibly explain why only half of them showed up at the polls or why only a sixth of them voted in the primaries or why three-fourths of them ignored daily events on the campaign trail.
The front end of the campaign is where the real participation problems start. Three decades ago, against the backdrop of the Vietnam protests, the presidential selection system was changed in order to place the voters in control of the nominating process. In its report, Mandate for Reform, the McGovern-Fraser Commission said: “popular participation is the way … for people committed to orderly political change to fulfill their needs and desires within our traditional political system.” The commission might have accomplished its goal if the reformed system had been properly designed. Instead, the reform produced a presidential campaign that starts far too early and lasts far too long, that runs on big money and responds to special interests, that has sapped the national party conventions of their energy and purpose, and that wears down the public as it grinds its way month after month toward November. If ever there was an election system designed to drive an electorate into submission, the year-long system of electing presidents is it.
Although some observers place the blame for declining participation squarely on citizens—they are portrayed as lazy and indifferent to their responsibilities—that argument, as will be shown, is refuted by the adverse changes that have taken place in U.S. politics during the past four decades. Ordinary citizens have been buffeted by developments they do not control and only vaguely comprehend, and which have diminished their stake, interest, and confidence in elections.
The great tools of democracy—its electoral institutions and media organizations—have increasingly been used for private agency. Personal ambition now drives campaigns, and profit and celebrity now drive journalism. Candidates, public officials, and journalists operate in a narrow professional world that is largely of their own making and that is remote from the world of the public they serve.
To be sure, ordinary Americans share some of the blame for their lapse in participation. It’s always easier to leave the work of democracy to others. But most of the fault lies elsewhere, and citizens cannot be expected to rededicate themselves merely because they are told their democracy needs them. Stronger leadership is required. Officials, candidates, and the media have failed in their responsibility to give Americans the type of politics that can excite, inform, and engage them—and that will fully and fairly reflect their will. The political scientist E. E. Schattschneider said it best: “Democracy was made for the people, not the people for Democracy.”90
* The U.S. Constitution does not prevent aliens, felons, and inmates from voting. They are barred by state laws. Indeed, although all states prohibit legal aliens from voting, some allow felons to vote. Some analysts say that the most precise turnout figure is one that includes the disbarred, since the decision to exclude them is a political one. Roughly 10 percent of Americans cannot vote, compared with, for example, only 2 percent in the United Kingdom. One out of seven black males of voting age is ineligible to vote because of a felony conviction. To ignore such differences, some analysts say, is to ignore official efforts to control the size and composition of the electorate. See Pippa Norris, Count Every Voice: Democratic Participation Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
* Based on asking respondents in the Vanishing Voter surveys whether they agreed or disagreed that a stated position was the actual position of a candidate on a dozen issues. Because respondents had a fifty-fifty chance of selecting the actual position by guessing alone, the level of knowledge for the public as a whole was measured by subtracting incorrect responses from correct ones. Gore’s position on prescription drugs was the only one of the twelve on which the corrected measure reached 50 percent. On one other issue—Bush’s stance on tax cuts—the uncorrected number of correct answers (52 percent) exceeded 50 percent. In this case, 11 percent guessed wrong, resulting in a corrected measure of 41 percent.