Join the Party!
As this chart shows, Americans are moving away from identifying with a political party. Thirty years ago, the electorate was divided into thirds: 1/3 Democrats, 1/3 Republicans, and 1/3 Independents. Today, the percent of the electorate that does not identify with a political party stands at 42%, while the two major parties lag behind, with 29% identifying as Democrats and 27% identifying as Republicans.
It's hard to motivate people to become active participants in our democratic processes. Government seems remote from most of our lives, and the news on events that are dramatic and out of the ordinary. Good governing is largely invisible, so it’s the elements of bad governing – corruption, malfeasance, policy disasters – that make the news.
This dynamic creates a problem, as the following graph illustrates: Americans fundamentally don’t trust the federal government. You can track this back to the 1980s, when President Reagan began to campaign against the excesses of the federal government, a manta that has been wholeheartedly embraced by the GOP. Washington DC is “the swamp,” the people who live there are not “real” Americans, and the locus of power in the United States needs to reside within the individual states – or so the argument goes.
People’s distaste for government leads to another problem – low voter turnout.
This line graph of voter turnout in Presidential election s over the past 40 years shows that turnout hovers about the 2/3 level. Given how hard various groups have fought for the right to vote over the years, it’s a bit discouraging to see this low turnout. But that’s a story for another day.
The picture is even gloomier for off-year and primary elections. In Virginia, our state-wide elections (held in odd-numbered years) generally produce turnout rates between 45% and 55%. Not awful, but about 20 percentage points behind Virginia’s turnout in presidential election years, which is in the mid-70% range.
Voter turnout is abysmal in primary elections – the contests where political parties select the candidates who will be on the ticket in the general election. Roughly 10% of registered voters participate in the primary contests.
Let’s look at other forms of political participation. As the chart below shows, about ¼ of voters do anything beyond voting. Everyone else is content simply to vote on election day.
All of this leads me to my main point for today – much of what people complain about in politics today focuses on things that happen within the party organizations. To understand this, let’s look at the functions of political parties.
To field candidates on election day, parties have to do most of their work during other parts of the years.
They organize and form connections to the community so that their electoral work is easier when it’s campaign season.
They hold conferences and conventions to decide on the issues the party cares about, both in elections and in governing. When voters choose to vote for a candidate of a given party, it should be because the voter agrees with the policy goals of the party. Those policy goals don’t arrive out of the ether; they are hashed out in intra-party discussions.
They coordinate their efforts with other party organizations at the local, state, and national levels. If a party is going to stand for something, it has to demonstrate consistence across geographic boundaries levels of government. This, again, is led by the parties during the parts of the year that are not campaign season.
They nominate the candidates who will be on the ticket in November. One thing I hear from many disgruntled voters is that they don’t like the candidates on the ballot in the general election. Well, if voters want to see different candidates, they have to participate in the process of selecting candidates.
How’s that phrase go? “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
As I wrote about last Friday, democracies require political parties and the fundamental political structures of the United States dictate that we’ll have a two-party system. You may not like this, but them’s the breaks. So if you want things to change, you can’t wait for someone else to change them. It’s up to all of us.
As we approach this year’s statewide elections in Virginia (we’re electing the entire state legislature), figure out a way you can be involved. It’s a given that you’ll vote – right? But beyond that, what can you do?
The nominating process is over. The candidates for the fall ballot are set.
Find out what House and Senate district you live in. All of the states redrew their legislative maps at the end of last you; if you live in Virginia, you are in a different district from what you may be familiar with. I know that because Virginia renumbered all of the districts. You can find this out on this website:
https://whosmy.virginiageneralassembly.gov/
Once you’ve figured out what district you live in, find out who’s on the ballot for each race you’ll have the opportunity to vote for. In addition to the state House and Senate races, you’ll have a variety of local races – school boards, local city councils and boards of supervisors, and the like. Here’s a good source for identifying all of the candidates who have qualified for the ballot. https://ballotpedia.org/Virginia_elections,_2023
Now, figure out what you can do beyond showing up to vote in the fall. Figure out which party you generally support, and then find out what you can do to help them be successful in the fall. You can be as “hands-on” as you want. I was just talking with one of the campaign field officers for one of my local candidates, and they’ll be asking, for example, for volunteers to do voter registration or staff the campaign headquarters in shifts through the election. They’re always looking for people to knock on doors, distribute campaign literature, or write postcards to voters. You may decide to give rides to voters on election day or take cookies to the campaign office. The parties will be staffing information tents outside of the polls on election day, and they’ll be recruiting people to be “poll watchers” inside the precincts while the polls are open.
Voting is better than not voting, but voting is not enough if we expect democracy to work.