Voter Turnout Quotes

In 2008 and 2012, black women led the United States in voter turnout. They

Politics is a great, albeit painful, example of social contract disengagement. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are making laws that they’re not required to follow or that don’t affect them, they’re engaging in behaviors that would result in most of us getting fired, divorced, or arrested. They’re espousing values that are rarely displayed in their behavior. And just watching them shame and blame each other is degrading for us. They’re not living up to their side of the social contract and voter turnout statistics show that we’re disengaging.

write these pages, Japan and the U.S. are still practicing widespread selective denial of major problems. Japan currently acknowledges some problems (its large government debt and aging population), and incompletely acknowledges the issue of Japanese women’s role. But Japan still denies other problems: its lack of accepted alternatives to immigration for solving its demographic difficulties; the historical causes of Japan’s tense relations with China and Korea; and denial that Japan’s traditional policy of seeking to grab overseas natural resources rather than to help manage them sustainably is now outdated. The U.S., as I write, is still in widespread denial of our own major problems: political polarization, low voter turnout, obstacles to voter registration, inequality, limited socio-economic mobility, and decreasing government investment in public goods.

High voter turnout, which some equate with a healthy democracy, has been in Nigeria (and in some other countries) an indication instead of a fever pitch of political polarization.

The potential for manipulation here is enormous. Here’s one example. During the 2012 election, Facebook users had the opportunity to post an “I Voted” icon, much like the real stickers many of us get at polling places after voting. There is a documented bandwagon effect with respect to voting; you are more likely to vote if you believe your friends are voting, too. This manipulation had the effect of increasing voter turnout 0.4% nationwide. So far, so good. But now imagine if Facebook manipulated the visibility of the “I Voted” icon on the basis of either party affiliation or some decent proxy of it: ZIP code of residence, blogs linked to, URLs liked, and so on. It didn’t, but if it had, it would have had the effect of increasing voter turnout in one direction. It would be hard to detect, and it wouldn’t even be illegal. Facebook could easily tilt a close election by selectively manipulating what posts its users see. Google might do something similar with its search results.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word "France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, "What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: "France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid. Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples. Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him "liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something. Royal's opponent is married, but they live apart and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that, for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches: because they're not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, "I'm no good at multitasking." Like any country, France has its faults, like all that ridiculous accordion music--but their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they're completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they're the greenest country. And they're not fat. They have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can't we admit we could learn something from them?

Stay involved in democracy. Fight for democracy. It can be messy and frustrating, believe me, I know. I understand why many Americans are frustrated by government and feel like it doesn’t make a difference. It’s not perfect, and not supposed to be. It’s only as good as we are, as what we choose to care about, as the people we elect. We’re never going to get 100 percent of what we want right away. But what if we got some of it right away, and protected it, and kept moving forward until we got the rest? That’s what voting is about. It’s not about making things perfect; it’s about making things better. It’s about putting us on track so that a generation from now, we can look back and say, “things got better starting now.” Voting is about using the power we have and pooling it together to get a government that’s more concerned, more responsive, more focused on the things that matter. This precious system of self-government is how we’ve come this far. It’s worth our time and effort. It’s worth protecting. I was heartened to see voter turnout leap this year over where it usually is. That’s great. Now imagine if we did that every time? Imagine if sixty or seventy percent of us, or even more, voted every time. We’d have a government that looks more representative, that’s full of life experience that’s more representative, that understands what people are going through and how we can work together to make people’s lives better. We’d have a government full of people who could corral a pandemic, who believe in science and have a plan to protect this planet for our kids; who care about working Americans and have a plan to help folks start getting ahead; who believe in racial equality and are willing to do the work to bring us closer an America where no matter what we look like, where we come from, who we love, or how much money we’ve got, we can make it if we try. That’s not science fiction. It’s possible! We just have to keep at it. Dec. 2020

BUMMER platforms have proudly reported on how they’ve experimented with making people sad, changing voter turnout, and reinforcing brand loyalty. Indeed, these are some of the best-known examples of research that were revealed in the formative days of BUMMER.

if there’s a low voter turnout, then the majority of the people who get off their ass and do vote will be the Diehard Republicans, meaning the Christian Right and the party faithful, and these are the groups that vote as they’re told, the ones controlled by the GOP Establishment, an Establishment that as already mentioned has got all its cash and credibility invested in the Shrub.

this also explains why the amazingly lifelike Al Gore, over in the Democratic race, has been so relentlessly Negative and depressing in his attacks on Bill Bradley. Since Gore, like the Shrub, has his party’s Establishment behind him, with all its organization and money and the Diehards who’ll fall into line and vote as they’re told, it’s in Big Al’s (and his party’s bosses’) interest to draw as few voters as possible into the Democratic primaries, because the lower the overall turnout, the more the Establishment voters’ ballots actually count.

On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds went to the polls to decide their fate. The results were mind-boggling for even the most optimistic proponents of independence. The turnout reached 84 percent, with more than 90 percent of voters supporting independence. Western Ukraine led the way, with 99 percent in favor in the Ternopil oblast of Galicia. But the center, south, and even the east were not far behind. In Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, 95 percent voted for independence; in Odesa, in the south, 85 percent; and in the Donetsk region, in the east, 83 percent. Even in the Crimea, more than half the voters supported independence: 57 percent in Sevastopol and 54 percent in the peninsula as a whole. (At that time, Russians constituted 66 percent of the Crimean population, Ukrainians 25 percent, and the Crimean Tatars, who had just begun to return to their ancestral homeland, only 1.5 percent.) In the center and east of the country, many voted for independence while supporting Leonid Kravchuk’s bid for the presidency. He won 61 percent of the popular vote, obtaining a majority in all regions of Ukraine except Galicia. There, victory went to the longtime Gulag prisoner and head of the Lviv regional administration Viacheslav Chornovil. Ukraine voted for independence and entrusted its future to a presidential candidate who, many believed, could strike a balance between Ukraine’s various regions and nationalities, as well as between the republic’s communist past and its independent future.

in a highly suspect election with record low voter turnout in which he had either jailed or banned from the ballot all viable opposition candidates.

Elections Canada is now banned from campaigning to boost voter turnout. The position of elections commissioner has been moved from Elections Canada to the office of Canada’s director of public prosecutions. Tellingly, the new law does not change the rules to ensure that people are required to cooperate with Elections Canada investigations.

California is having an election Tuesday, but it might as well be a secret to many of the state’s voters. After a June primary in which a record low 25 percent of registered voters cast ballots, political analysts are predicting that Tuesday’s turnout could be the worst ever for a general election.

percent of registered voters cast ballots, political analysts are predicting that Tuesday’s turnout could be the worst ever for a general election. The rock-bottom record was set in 2002, when

The typical argument we hear from the Obama administration and other leftists is that voter ID laws discourage minorities, young people, and the elderly from voting. Yet, we know from reputable surveys that the common sense use of photo ID is supported by every demographic group in America. Two-thirds of African Americans support it; two-thirds of Hispanics; two-thirds of liberals; and even two-thirds of those who consider themselves to be Democrats. There is simply no evidence to support the contention that the requirement to show a photo ID (which are provided for free in every state with such a requirement) discourages legitimate voters from voting. In fact, in states such as Indiana and Georgia where photo ID requirements have been in place for almost a decade, studies show that voter turnout has actually increased. Photo IDs are part and parcel of living in a modern society. We have to show a photo ID to fly on a plane, cash a check, purchase prescription drugs, and to enter federal and private office buildings—including the US Department of Justice in Washington, where the Obama administration has directed its mostly unsuccessful attacks on voter ID laws. South Carolina beat the Justice Department in a court fight, when former Attorney General Eric Holder tried to stop the state from implementing its law.

Then there are spurious intellectual discussions about ‘voter apathy’ and so on, as if such factors could possibly explain and somehow justify massive disengagement from our political processes. Indeed, such discussion is hugely insulting to those who choose to abstain from the political lottery on principle or out of plain disgust (and who, incidentally, might participate in dramatic numbers if a ‘none of the above’ option were offered on the ballot, a solution to the turnout problem that has been vigorously thwarted since it would make an implicit rejection of the political process as it stands more explicit). We cannot simply assume that half the eligible population is too bored or too lazy to participate in political life, say, once every four years; that demands a pretty extreme assumption of disinterest and lethargy. There is little doubt that a great number feel that the mode of ‘participation’ available to them is inauthentic6 – and that the ‘choice’ they might be a party to would make them culpable for its consequences. As such, non-participation can be seen as a very modest form of moral revolt, since it undermines the legitimacy of those who exercise political authority and the very institutions that embody this authority.

Finally, Christians can use more-advanced strategies like geofencing. Geofencing is a powerful marketing strategy my marketing company uses for commercial clients. It targets prospects and gathers their mobile IDs based on their physical location. You can target your prospect by time and/or location — for example, anyone who went to a selected church in the last week, in the last month, or in the last six months. You can also select anyone who went just one time, two times in one month, four times in two months, and so on. It’s a great way to get very specific contact lists that meet pretty much any criteria you can think of. If a pastor simply won’t talk about the election, geofencing their church is a good way to get directly to the church attendees. For one campaign, my company “fenced” 74 different evangelical churches in a candidate's district and gathered 94,000 mobile IDs, thereby building a large database in a short amount of time. In the end, we collected the contact information of 10,000 highly motivated voters who were also considered “low propensity” voters for the clients’ database. We also generated potential voters by getting: • 100,000+ landing page visitors. • 942,000 ad impressions. • 288,000 video views. All these views and ad impressions led to increased voter awareness and turnout for our client.

Among the Haredi public, voter turnout was significantly higher than among the general population and loyalty was key.

The Arab minority in Israel had never quite managed to realize its full electoral potential. Voter turnout was routinely lower than that of the Jewish Israelis, whether because of a lack of trust in their own politicians or cynicism about the system.

Larry Diamond, a prominent American political sociologist, wrote in January 2015. “There is a growing sense, both domestically and internationally, that democracy in the United States has not been functioning effectively.” Voter turnouts were sinking. The cost of election campaigns was crushing. The role of dark money in politics was surging. Public trust in government was fading. Comity, courtesy, the consideration that the other person might have a point, were dying. Conspiracy theories were trending. Talking heads were shouting. Everyone was arguing with everybody

Democrats constitute a diffuse majority of the electorate, but seem at times lukewarm toward a base that the party has often lectured to or taken for granted, chided, if ever there is lower-than-expected turnout, despite voter suppression, sadly buying into caste assumptions rather than bolstering

What the current aura of disenchantment means for the future of American and world politics is uncertain. Will members of the public turn their backs on politics and turn to aesthetic appreciation, enjoying the comforts of religion, or building Shangri-las in their own minds?20 The post–World War II record-low voter turnout in the 2014 midterm elections might be one indication that Americans are washing their hands of even the most basic expressions of political engagement. But there are other indications that the legions of discontented do not reject the idea of progress as such and will not retreat from politics; instead what we are seeing is a rejection of liberal universalist visions of progress and the political programs associated with them. In a 2013 address before the Federal Assembly, Russian president Vladimir Putin declared that “attempts to push supposedly more progressive development models onto other nations actually resulted in regression, barbarity and extensive bloodshed.”21 Putin’s military incursions in Russia’s near (and not- so-near) abroad aside, increasing numbers of Westerners seem to agree with the sentiment of his remarks, punishing establishment politicians as “globalists” and rewarding inward-looking populists. From Brexiteers bucking the European Union to America-firsters looking to make their country “great again,” from supporters of the National Front in France to loyalists of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands or the Freedom Party of Austria, nationalists are on the ascent, seeking progress for themselves and their compatriots on their own terms.

For their part, Democrats constitute a diffuse majority of the electorate, but seem at times lukewarm toward a base that the party has often lectured to or taken for granted, chided, if ever there is lower-than-expected turnout, despite voter suppression, sadly buying into caste assumptions rather than bolstering their most loyal voters as do the Republicans with theirs. Democrats expend energy and weaken their power pining for the die-hard voters of their opponents, the homecoming queens of the electorate, while taking for granted the majority that they already have.

[on sponsored elections] Thus the dramatic denouement of the election is voter turnout, which measures the ability of the forces of democracy and peace (the army) to overcome rebel threats. [...] "Off the agenda" for the government in its own sponsored elections are all of the basic parameters that make an election meaningful or meaningless prior to the election-day proceedings. These include: (1) freedom of speech and assembly; (2) freedom of the press; (3) freedom to organize and maintain intermediate economic, social, and political groups (unions, peasant organizations, political clubs, student and teacher associations, etc.); (4) freedom to form political parties, organize members, put forward candidates, and campaign without fear of extreme violence; and (5) the absence of state terror and a climate of fear among the public. Also off the agenda is the election-day "coercion package" that may explain turnout in terms other than devotion to the army and its plans, including any legal requirement to vote, and explicit or implicit threats for not voting.

One of Charles Koch’s primary skills was identifying undervalued commodities. By 2013, it became evident that political power in the state of Kansas was an undervalued commodity. The state was deeply Republican and still largely rural. This meant that most Kansas state officials—the occupants of the state house and the state senate—were elected during primary contests in their home districts. A state politician in Kansas might be elected by no more than a thousand voters during a primary race. Such elections drew a turnout level near zero and generated almost no media attention. It was common for a campaign to cost $10,000, on the upside.

Although the Parliament has performed well enough in using its now considerable powers over legislation and the budget, the voters’ turnout has declined with each election, from 63 per cent in 1979 to 43 per cent in 2014. One reason is a general trend of declining turnouts in elections within member states. Another is a widespread decline in support for the EU. Yet another may be that the Parliament in particular has been exposed to critical and, particularly in Britain, downright hostile media comment, fastening on matters such as the prolonged failure to establish an adequate system for controlling MEPs’ expenses (largely the fault of MEPs themselves), and the two costly buildings in Brussels and Strasbourg between which it commutes (entirely the fault of governments).

While legal changes in the way we vote are the best way to increase turnout, there are a number of steps that can be taken to encourage targeted voters and our personal acquaintances to cast a ballot.

After one attempt at an election in the UAE in 2006 attracted low voter turnout, a prominent member of the government remarked, “This is particularly disappointing given that all of the candidates and participants were from very good families, and were all personally approved by the UAE’s rulers.

these low percentages are in the context of a lower voter turnout than

Researchers have even found that voter turnout increases when people are forced to create implementation intentions by answering questions like: “What route are you taking to the polling station? At what time are you planning to go? What bus will get you there?” Other successful government programs have prompted citizens to make a clear plan to send taxes in on time or provided directions on when and where to pay late traffic bills.

In a society of declining intelligence, we would expect: rising crime and corruption; decreasing civic participation and lower voter turn-out; higher rates of illegitimacy; poorer health and greater obesity, an increased interest in the instinctive, especially sex; greater political instability and decline in democracy; higher levels of social conflict; higher levels of selfishness and so a decline in any welfare state; a growing unemployable underclass; falling educational standards; and a lack of intellectualism and thus decreasing interest in education as a good in itself. We would also expect more and more little things to go wrong that we didn’t used to notice: buses running out of petrol, trains delayed, aeroplanes landing badly, roads not being repaired, people arriving late and thinking it’s perfectly okay; several large and lots of little lies . . . In addition, the broader modern system – especially of extended formal education (stretching ever further into adult life), exam results and continuous assessments, required subjects and courses; the supposed ‘meritocracy’ – suppresses the influence of genius, since the Endogenous personality is seeking, ever more strongly with age, to follow his inner drives, his Destiny, and all the paraphernalia of normal, standard requirements stands in his path. While others need sticks and carrots, and are grateful for encouragement, discipline and direction; the Endogenous personality is driven from within and (beyond a basic minimum) he neither needs nor appreciates these things – at best they slow him down, at worst they thwart and exclude him. The Endogenous personality requires mainly to be allowed to do what he intrinsically and spontaneously wants to do – but in modern society he is more likely to be prevented.

Dems should be looking toward untapped numbers rather than the Joe Lunchbuckets they assume abandoned ship for Trump in 2016. It wasn’t the white working-class voters who flipped from Obama to Trump that the Democrats really lost. To believe this ignores the fact that there are big cities in all of the controversial states Hillary Clinton lost—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—with large black populations. It ignores the fact that the decrease in black turnout in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee was larger than the margin of Trump’s victory by a factor of ten, meaning that it wasn’t the white working-class voters who abandoned them, it was the black voters who felt they weren’t being acknowledged and so chose to stay home who tipped the vote in those states.

Mook, always attentive to cash flow, knew that it was much more costly to try to persuade undecided voters to back Hillary than it was to register her supporters or to make sure they went to the polls. The analytics team could also conduct less expensive surveys than the pollsters to get a snapshot of the horse race in a given state. Separate from the three scores, the analytics experts would do quick surveys with a small universe of voters and then extrapolate how many other voters with similar demographic profiles were likely to vote and for whom they would cast their ballots. The same methods had been used in the primaries, when adjustments could be made based on the outcome of a string of contests. The general election was different, in part, because there was only one Election Day. The analytics were also thought to be more precise at predicting general-election outcomes in each state than primary outcomes because the exact shape of the electorate could be harder to project in lower-turnout contests. But in both cases, Mook relied heavily on the data to figure out where the campaign could get the most bang for its buck. Like a baseball executive in the Moneyball era, Mook looked at the data as the means for taking the least costly route to victory.

Mook worried that an anti-Hillary candidate would gain traction while voters wondered about the fire in her belly. If she’s slow to get in, he thought, people will think she doesn’t want it enough, that she’s not hungry enough. Plus, there was a golden opportunity for Hillary to take control of the party and put her stamp on it at a time when Obama’s brand had been scraped by the shoals of a low-turnout election. She could be a rescuer, a savior, of the Democratic Party.

When democracy is weak, lower-income people have no defense against the wealthy rigging the rules and taking too large a share of the pie. Sooner or later, people of modest means, who tend to be cynical about government to begin with, give up on the idea that democratic participation and affirmative government can improve their lives. For more than forty years, voter turnout has been on a steady decline. States governed by Republicans have sought to deliberately depress turnout, especially among people likely to vote for Democrats. Extreme gerrymandering has compounded the sense that voting is futile, since incumbents can usually count on getting reelected. But the best-off 20 percent still vote at historic levels, while the decline has been steepest among the poor. When the bottom half turns away from government, people oscillate between not voting at all and embracing the magical promises of

They are Americans—Americans that would have voted against you and, in all likelihood, would have opposed you once you won. I’m not saying it’s good that they were killed. I’m just saying these attacks are going to seriously depress the voter turnout in these districts, and probably the rest of the country. Low voter turnout favors

Between 2014 and 2016, states deleted almost 16 million people from voter registration lists, purges that accelerated in the last years of the Obama administration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. States enacted new voter ID laws even as they created more barriers to obtaining this newly required ID. Together, these actions had the cumulative effect of reducing voter participation of marginalized people and immigrants, both of whom were seen as more likely to vote Democrat. “A paper found that states were far more likely to enact restrictive voting laws,” wrote the commentator Jonathan Chait, “if minority turnout in their state had recently increased.

Berkeley political scientist, Human Events noted, predicted national turnout would go up 20 percent under Carter’s reforms—a bad thing, the editors said, because “the bulk of these extra votes will go to Carter’s Democratic Party… with blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups accounting for most of the increase.” The Heritage Foundation, meanwhile, got out one issue brief arguing that instant registration might allow the “eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote, and another arguing that it was a mistake to “take for granted that it is desirable to increase the number of people who vote.

I remembered seeing the lines of people who had waited for hours and hours to vote in the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. The lines snaked on for miles. I remember wondering at the time, as U.S. voter turnout was hovering under forty percent, how long that sense of joy and appreciation for the right to vote would last and whether there was any way to revive it in America among those who have never been denied the right to vote.

We haven’t truly enabled all the people of this society to participate in self-government to the fullest extent of their potential. We haven’t come close, not in an age when our elected officials and their staffs are overwhelmingly white, male, and affluent. Nor have we truly enabled all the people of this society to participate fully in economic life as creators and contributors. Not when 48 percent of the new jobs in the country are low-wage jobs paying less than $15 an hour, and when tens of millions rely on government payments for subsistence. And we haven’t truly enabled the citizens of this country to be as powerful as possible. Not when voter turnout is rarely above 60 percent (at best) and when poor, nonwhite, or immigrant voters are still being disenfranchised.

One needed reform, and the eighth proposal in my ten-point blueprint, is to address declining voter participation by making voting mandatory. Established democracies, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, have seen “a slow but steady decline in turnout since the 1970s.”8 In November 2014, only 36 percent of eligible voters in the United States cast a vote—the lowest turnout in more than seventy years. And while estimates show more than 58 percent of eligible voters voted in the 2016 US presidential election, turnout was down from 2008 (when it was 62 percent). Since 1900, the percentage of voters voting in US presidential elections has scarcely gone above 60 percent. Many of the world’s countries whose turnout rates are highest—including Australia, Singapore, Belgium, and Liechtenstein, where the 93 percent turnout rate is the highest in Western Europe—enforce compulsory voting laws. As of August 2016, of the thirty-five member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), five had forms of compulsory voting. In those countries, turnout rates were near 100 percent. There are more than twenty countries where voting is compulsory, including Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, and Singapore. In Australia, voter turnout is usually around 90 percent. A more direct comparison within the European Union member states reveals remarkable turnouts from states where voting is mandatory, with 89.6 percent in Belgium and 85.6 percent in Luxembourg. For the sake of comparison, voter turnout was only 42.4 percent in France, 43.8 percent in Spain, and a mere 35.6 percent in the United Kingdom.9 Most often, compulsory voting is enforced through fines on those who don’t vote. Typically these fines are relatively small; in Australia it is AUD 20 the first time you don’t vote and have no good reason, and AUD 50 afterward, while it ranges from 10 to 20 pesos in Argentina.10 Many times, the penalty amounts to little more than a symbolic slap on the wrist.

The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment,

In fact, I lay some of the blame for Hillary’s low turnout on those assurances from the media that her victory was a sure thing. Voter behavior indicates that if voters believe their candidate has it in the bag, they will not, for example, take off work to go vote and lose a day’s wages, believing their vote isn’t needed. The press actually demotivated her base. If they’d reported the truth, that the race was very close, there is no doubt in my mind that they would have turned out for her.

Broadly speaking, the format for creating an implementation intention is: “When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.” Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentions are effective for sticking to our goals, whether it’s writing down the exact time and date of when you will get a flu shot or recording the time of your colonoscopy appointment. They increase the odds that people will stick with habits like recycling, studying, going to sleep early, and stopping smoking. Researchers have even found that voter turnout increases when people are forced to create implementation intentions by answering questions like: “What route are you taking to the polling station? At what time are you planning to go? What bus will get you there?” Other successful government programs have prompted citizens to make a clear plan to send taxes in on time or provided directions on when and where to pay late traffic bills.

But 2018 broke the pattern. Record turnout occurred across the country to elect governors, state legislators, and those running for federal office. The national sea change occurred in part due to a surge of interest in state and local politics caused by greater demand from constituents. State lawmakers have more of an impact on the daily lives of voters of color and the marginalized than Congress ever likely will. Just as they set the law overseeing the right to vote, they also determine criminal justice, health care access, housing policy, educational equity, and transportation. Governors set budgets, sign bills, and implement these ideas. Secretaries of state act as superintendents of election law, but in many states they also manage access for small businesses and a host of administrative duties invisible to citizens until the policies go awry. Attorneys general serve as the chief law enforcement arm of the state, determining statewide matters that can have local impact.

Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.