“It Won’t Make Any Difference”
This year, more than in any recent election, there is a focus on voting. A recognition that the individual vote is the unit of power in a democracy. That voting doesn’t just happen. That casting a ballot and having it counted is part of a system. A system that requires voters to register, says who can vote, when they can vote, how they can vote, and how and when the votes will be counted and verified, if necessary.
Motivation is also a hurdle. Almost half of voting age adults did not vote in the 2016 presidential election. Can they be persuaded to register this year and then vote? How? By whom? What matters to them?
The effort to persuade has been taken up by individuals and groups not usually engaged publicly in politics. Professional athletes led by LeBron James are putting their prestige and millions of dollars into motivating voters and getting them registered. Emergency room doctors have set up voter registration kiosks in several thousand hospitals across the country. Even the fashion industry is spreading the word in apparel designs.
Fair Fight 2020, led by Stacey Abrams who narrowly lost her race for Governor of Georgia, was formed to make sure that those who want to vote, get to vote, combating legislative and administrative actions to purge voter registration rolls and limit the times and places for voting.
And on the ground, locally organized groups who want change in the political decisions that affect their lives, change in how their communities are run, and change in who has power, are registering voters.
The PEW Research Foundation, in its polling, finds that 83 percent of registered voters think it “really matters” who wins in November, 10 percentage points higher than in 2016 and 20 percentage points higher than other elections in the past 20 years.
It is a different story, however, among many unregistered, for whom our politics has not performed. Those who have to cope daily with low wages, poor housing, limited health care, inadequate schools, police brutality, and a harsh criminal justice system. They have heard promises. They haven’t seen any results on the streets where they live. They don’t expect that voting will change that.
In Kenosha, one person had this reaction, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, when asked by a volunteer to register. “Let’s say I did go out and vote and I voted for Biden. That’s not going to change police brutality. It’s not going to change the way the police treat African-Americans compared to Caucasians.”
A second said, “What good is it to go out there and do it? It isn’t going to make any difference.”
Earlier this year, a New York Times reporter tagging along with a person going door to door in Florida trying to persuade people to register witnessed the following:
“Deontre Washington’s mind was elsewhere as he listened. He thought of the 18-month sentence he had served for a burglary in 2014, when he was homeless and lacked the money to feed his two children. He thought about the Florida prison he was sent to where men were forced to work without pay; he thought about the beatings by guards and the threat of solitary confinement there.”
“And then he thought out loud. ‘I’m not going to vote,’ he finally said. ‘I don’t care about this government and this government doesn’t care about me.’”
It is not the words at election time that motivate. It will be change on the ground in all the days between elections. Those of us who believe that politics can and should make a difference have to produce in the community.
More people are realizing that change in their communities will happen only when they take political power for themselves and make politics local again; when local people recruit their own candidates, provide the resources, and build the organizations necessary to win.
Black voters have long complained of being wooed during elections and ignored in the interim. Those same complaints have been common here in rural Western Wisconsin. The “coordinated campaigns” directed from Washington or Madison come in for several months every two or four years, use our resources, extract our votes and then leave.
The problem is not with the “coordinated campaigns” themselves. They do what they have to do, the only thing they can do when they don’t have local roots. The problem is that over past decades political power has become centralized. The solution is not to demand that centralized power pay attention to the local, but to take power back.
Jessica Byrd, deputy campaign manager for Stacey Abrams’s race for governor of Georgia in 2018 and founder of the Electoral Justice Project at the Movement for Black Lives, said it well in an opinion piece in the New York Times.
“For a new generation of Black activists, success lies in the process of making change — in politics, policies and social practices. On the campaign trail, we hire managers and organizers who have experiences in common with their communities. We design field plans with an eye to year-round engagement rather than a monthlong, extractive Get Out the Vote program. When we write campaign plans, we think about mutual aid and long-term governance. … The ultimate goal of the ballot is to build and sustain coalitions of community members who can have a say in governance.”
In more direct words: you get to govern when you organize and mobilize local voters behind a program.
The approach reminds me of the party organization when I first became active in politics in the 1960s in Sangamon County in Illinois. I was a precinct committeeperson, one of 265 in the County, each of us elected in our own precinct in the party primary. My role was to deliver the vote in my precinct. The more votes I delivered, the more influence I had in the party, and in that day, the more jobs I was able to deliver for people in my precinct. Lop Ear Jones, a longtime committee person who ran a downtown precinct, was legendary. If he was for you, you had 300 votes; if he was against you, your opponent had 300 votes.
Being committeeman was more than knocking on doors a week before the election. Three months earlier on my first trip through the precinct, I registered people who had moved in and the teenagers who turned 18. It was a service call. By the time I had knocked on the same door three times my face was familiar and people were ready to engage in conversation. By the second or third election I was missed if I didn’t come by. Between elections, people knew they could call me if they had problems with the city, the county or the state bureaucracies. When it came time to vote, they were willing to listen to me. There was a connection to build on.
State and national candidates came to Sangamon County, not to tell us how to fit into their campaign plans, but to ask for our support.
For many reasons the political parties have lost much of their influence and have become not much more than vehicles for other interests and groups to use for their own purposes.
But the base for the power they once had remains the same. You have to organize. You have to deliver. You have to make a difference in everyday life. You have to be there. The effort to bring political power back to the local is building in more than a few communities across the country. With perseverance, this may be the legacy of the 2020 election.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
[subscribe2]