Are you reading the signs?
Yard signs, voter motivation, “Kitchen Table” economics, the Dark Enlightenment, and the future of America
Election Day is a week away. This is a difficult time in America, and in American politics. Many people (myself included) are trying to make sense of a moment that feels both surprising, and long in the making. Some of the views expressed here may be upsetting, or controversial. Your compassionate curiosity and criticism is always welcome. Remember to cast your ballot before 8pm on November 5.
Every fall, a new kind of plant sprouts up on lawns across America. Political yard signs are a mainstay of election season, a forest of colors and names that convey a variable degree of meaning. These signs range from voting instructions — VOTE TINA FEY FOR COUNTY JUDGE, to slogans — YES WE CAN, STRONGER TOGETHER — and of course almost always include the names of the candidates themselves.
Every election season, civic advocates fan the flames of electoral democracy. “Just vote” becomes a mantra so deafening, it threatens to lose all meaning. While many know that a healthy democracy begins well before anyone enters a ballot box, the opportunity to cast a vote never fails to divert our collective attention. Among the candidate yard signs will appear a sprinkling of VOTE and ELECTION DAY IS NOVEMBER X signs designed to drive turnout, regardless of your choice of candidate.
As a field organizer on the Clinton campaign in 2016, we guarded our yard signs jealously, only giving them out as rewards to particularly dedicated volunteers. This year, I received a text message from a candidate asking if his campaign team could install a yard sign in my yard themselves. Limiting the distribution of yard signs may have proved to be one of many of the failed tactics that sunk Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Still, every time I see this forest of yard signs begin to grow along the roads of America, I have to wonder: who are these signs meant to motivate?
One week from Election Day 2024 (November 5, at a polling place near you!), I’ve been wrestling with questions about the past, present, and future of democracy, and the choices voters face gazing into an uncertain future.
What is democracy made of?
Democracy in its original form began in Athens, Greece in 500 BC as one man, one vote, with five hundred randomly selected male citizens elected to serve a one-year term on the Council of 500. While democracy fell out of favor in the intervening 2000 years, during the Enlightenment, it realized a renaissance with John Locke’s proposal of a “social contract” between the government and the governed. Locke’s ideas laid the foundation for modern representative democracy, pioneered by the United States in 1776.
Unlike direct democracy, representative government nominally depends on self-appointed candidates receiving an electoral endorsement from a majority of voters.
Over the years, voting participation scholars have made a study of who votes and why. Voter registration increases with age — less than half of eligible citizens under 24 are registered to vote, whereas more than three-quarters of those over 60 are registered. In the last 6 years, 70% of eligible voters have voted in one of the last three federal elections. Two-thirds voted in 2020, while just under half voted in 2018 and 2022, both landmark years for midterm election participation. Like voter registration, voter turnout increases with age. Women are more likely to vote than men. Those with a college education are more likely to vote than those without it, though college students themselves are often unreliable voters.
However, this wasn’t always the case. The share of voters without any college education has fallen sharply over the last 30 years. In 1996, voters with a high school education or less accounted for almost half (47%) of the electorate. In 2019, that number had fallen to less than a third (32%). In 1996, 51% of Democrats had no college education whereas by 2019, 72% of Democrats had some college and 41% were college graduates. This trend correlates with other changes in education. In the same period, college attainment increased by 13% and high school graduation rates rose from 80% to 90%. Still, it’s safe to say that before Bill Clinton and NAFTA, the Democratic Party was largely the party of the blue collar working class, a group that has over the last three decades, drifted into the welcoming embrace of the Republican Party.
This change has likely also been shaped by the growing power of Fox News to influence American thinking with false narratives and the decline of American industry after NAFTA. As a result, fewer American voters see their government as working in their best interest.
To generalize broadly, voting increases with the understanding of how systems of governance operate, whether that understanding is gleaned from formal education or years of lived experience. But a clear plurality of eligible voters do not believe that democracy matters enough to participate in it. If “Did Not Vote” had been on the ballot in 2016, it would have won, as nearly 100 million voters stayed home rather than cast a ballot for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Nearly one in four voters who voted in 2020 hadn’t voted four years earlier. And yet still, a third of eligible voters stayed home. But why?
Why does anyone vote?
As field organizers, we were trained to help people make a plan to vote — the surest way to help someone exercise their right by election day. But making a plan to vote is about as easy as planning a visit to the dentist.
Where do you have to go? When will you have time? How will you get there? What kind of ID will you need? How long will it take? Will you have to wait in line?
Without sufficient conviction, you’d be forgiven for bypassing this onslaught of logistical questions and inconvenience and making a quick stop at the Starbucks drive-thru instead.
While voter registration is a prerequisite for voting, why someone actually votes or not is a lot more complicated. According to one study, altruism and duty motivate about two-thirds of voters. Another 20% report that they vote because of “belonging” or “social approval,” which may account for highly organized groups, like unions, that discipline voting behavior among their members.
In a study of both Democrats and Republicans, Data for Progress found that motivations for voting vary considerably across party lines. A significant share of Democrats vote on the basis of their values, or against the threat of Republican values taking hold, whereas the largest share of Republicans, especially those who sometimes vote for Democrats, are principally concerned about the economy. Perhaps those identified as voting for “selfish” reasons are among those most concerned about economic, “kitchen table” issues.
This confluence of factual information about voter registration and behavior and candidate perception winds itself into a rope we can easily hang ourselves with before election day: polling data. The advent of statistics means those who wish to know the outcome of the election ahead of time can’t resist the urge to extrapolate.
In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, I would take screenshots of the NY Times “chance of winning” map and post it to Instagram every few days. Now, eight years later, I’m grateful for this tragic trail of breadcrumbs, an insistent reminder of how clueless we were to what was really being revealed by that election. On November 4, 2016 the New York Times predicted Hillary Clinton had more than a 66% chance of winning. On November 9, they were 100% wrong.
This year, both the yard signs and the polling numbers seem to portend a different kind of election. “Trump Safety, Kamala Crime” says one yard sign I’ve seen across the northeast, which underscores the kind of fearmongering the Trump campaign relies on to inspire support. “Democrats Support Hard Working Families,” says another. Is that true? I wonder. Does the party of the college educated elite actually represent the interests of America’s “working class”? Who is America’s “working class” now, anyway? While Harris and others up and down the ticket like to make this claim, those hard working families may feel disgruntled by the lack of evidence to support this it.
How will America vote this time?
The truth is, those with a clear conviction about the issues they care about or the candidate they like better won’t determine the outcome of this race. Those folks are already represented in the ~49% of voters who report they intend to vote for Trump and the 49% of voters who say they intend to vote for Harris. Just like in 2020 and 2016, some 100,000 voters across Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (and maybe Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina) will be the deciders.
Most of these unaffiliated, undecided “persuadable voters” probably don’t have a college degree, if any college education at all. They may be voting for the first time ever, but more likely, are voting for the first time in four years. They may be concerned about the “immigrant threat” Trump and his surrogates have continued to hammer in their public appeal. But most likely, they are suffering under the economic reality of life in America for middle-income earners.
https://open.substack.com/pub/aliciabonner/p/the-economics-of-poverty
They are likely among the 29% of Americans who are ALICE – asset limited, income constrained, employed. On a recent episode of The Daily podcast, Jenny Medina spoke with several such likely voters in Las Vegas to understand their motivations and concerns about the upcoming election. Medina reported on the acute hardships facing many moderate wage workers, roommates who can barely afford to make rent, who have given up on their dream of ever owning a home.
While the “inflation crisis” is reportedly over, its aftereffects remain in the affordability crisis that is still all too real for so many Americans. If you’re not living paycheck to paycheck right now, you’re almost certainly among the 20% of Americans who earn more than $150,000 a year, which might insulate your household from this crisis. Being a “high-income American,” you’re probably also college educated, a high-information voter, who listens to podcasts and regularly reads the news.
Being in this privileged position, it can be hard to empathize with those who don’t clearly understand the levers of economic influence the federal government wields and the lagging timeline on which those levers yield results. Lower income, lower information voters will hold Joe Biden and by extension, Kamala Harris and his administration, responsible for the economic hardship they are experiencing and witnessing in their communities. Many of these Americans assume that the business of government would be better managed by “a businessman” rather than a stable of college-educated lawyers.
The nature of the candidates themselves, the wo/man behind the yard sign, is also at play. Are they “likable”? Would you have a beer with them? For the second time in history, a woman sits atop the Democratic ticket. While she, unlike her “I’m-With-Her” predecessor would prefer to downplay her gender as a factor in her candidacy, the socially entrenched misogyny around women in positions of power is certainly at play. As Sheryl Sandberg first instructed in Lean In a decade ago, “success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.” Harris is working hard to bridge this likability gap, but its effects are hard to miss.
In last week’s episode, Ezra Klein assessed Donald Trump’s cognitive fitness for office using a pop psychology frame. He, I think rightly, assessed that Trump’s extreme level of inhibition is part of what makes him such an effective candidate, while also for many, a terrifying head of state. While the words coming out of his mouth may or may not be based in reality, the man seems to always say exactly what he’s thinking. At a time when so many people are angry, anxious, and deeply disappointed by their economic reality, Donald Trump is unafraid to say outloud what many people are thinking and feeling. Regardless of fact, there is the resonance of truth in what he says, which others can hear.
College educated white Democrats might find this kind of straight-from-the-gut, say-what-you-think uber-candor offensive in its inaccuracy and crassness, but those who share these kinds of thoughts and feelings find Trump’s self-expression refreshing, a signal for the kind of courage they expect him to show in his position of leadership.
Kamala Harris, on the other hand, practices the kind of practiced rhetoric expected by the party of the college-educated elite. She gives the impression that every word out of her mouth has been crafted — focus-grouped, even — to strike exactly the right note, telling her audience exactly what she thinks they want to hear. While this kind of rhetoric may be grounded in fact, it also rings hollow for those who are angry that their country’s government is failing to help them realize the American dream.
Who gets to decide who gets to decide?
In a pre-election roundtable on The Daily hosted by David Barbaro, Astead Herndon spoke about a voter named Jake he had met in a recent visit to Minnesota, a stereotype of the undecided, “persuadable voter.” Jake hadn’t voted in the last election because he hadn’t felt like it, but he did plan to vote in this one. He agreed with Trump on the economy and immigration, but he didn’t like him personally. He liked Kamala better, and agreed with her on abortion rights. How, Herndon asked, would Jake decide who to vote for?
“It’s just what’s going to matter most to me as I’m driving there,” he said.
Which of course, brings us back to the yard signs. Maybe the 1% of voters in the seven swing states that could decide this election really haven’t made up their minds yet. Maybe the last name they see before they walk into their polling location will determine how they cast their vote. Thirty percent of registered voters did not vote in any of the last three elections, and this year, we should reasonably expect them to do the same. Which thirty percent of course is the big wide open question.
Both the candidates are proxies for a moment of political reckoning. Life in America is hard right now, and the best efforts of our current elected representatives don’t seem to be able to make it any easier. Trump’s half of America wants to go back to the way things were. Harris wants her half of America to believe it can be better if we just do more policy. Both of these campaign promises seem impossible and incredible. The downstream effects of a global pandemic are still all too real, and remain largely unmanaged. Singular issue debates, like abortion access, affordability, housing, and immigration are each symptoms of a society that is breaking under the weight of extractive capitalism.
The Trouble with Extractive Capitalism
As a thirty-year-old field organizer in Florida in 2016, I was drunk on the illusion that voters decide who governs America. That was wrong. The Electoral College along with campaign finance ensure that the landed white men are still very much in control. Our newly elected Congress may well decide the outcome of this election. The yard signs suggest that individual leaders can save us, but the system they inhabit is failing them and us. We’re a nation at a crossroads, of political evolution and revolution.
It’s entirely possible our 250-year-old constitution, designed by and for white men of property, isn’t up to the task of governing a pluralistic society of 330 million people. It’s entirely possible we’ve reached the nuclear moment, when government as we know it collapses under its own weight. Some on the right hope to enshrine a new pseudo-monarchy, powered by slavery, a Dark Enlightenment that while hard to believe, is clearly very much intended.
Regardless of which one of the candidates prevails, the result is sure to be contentious and politically messy, if not violent. But it’s unlikely to be an extinction event for humanity. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. Sometimes people have to die for things to change. And if we’re lucky, sooner rather than later, we’ll realize: maybe now is the time to start over, to build a new system that works for all of us.
Your thoughts and feelings in response to this essay are most welcome.
If you know someone who may not have a plan to vote on or before Election Day, November 5, 2024, share this note with them as a reminder!