CALIFORNIA
FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2016, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“KEY PRIMARY ELECTION QUESTION: WHO WILL VOTE?”
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2016, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“KEY PRIMARY ELECTION QUESTION: WHO WILL VOTE?”
The key questions in the today’s
primary election (editors: sub “the June
7 primary” or “Tuesday’s primary,”for “today’s” here, depending on your run
date) include not merely who will win in each major party and how many
national convention delegates they might net, but also who will vote.
That last question, in fact, might
decide the answers to the first two. Before
all his opponents dropped out, it seemed that to do well, Republican
businessman Donald Trump needed votes from many, many thousands of Californians
who don’t ordinarily go to the polls or fill out ballots in advance. The same
for Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders on the Democratic side.
Former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, of course, already had the great majority of usual voters well in hand
long before advance voting stations opened and absentee ballots went out in
mid-May.
But the outpouring of youthful voters
aged between 18 and 25 for President Obama in 2008 and 2012 signals that both Trump
and Sanders also have the potential to change the makeup of the California
electorate.
That electorate normally is dominated
by older, white, college-educated, affluent, home-owning citizens. But as Trump
campaigned across America this year, he drew support mostly from people who
don’t fit all those categories: They may mostly be white, but they are not so
likely to be college-educated, affluent or homeowners. Many have voted only
sporadically, if ever, in the past. Sanders’ voters have often been a flip side
of that: Well-educated, mostly white, but younger and neither affluent nor
homeowners.
The normal California electoral divide
– the usual pattern of who votes and who does not – generally sees half of all
adult U.S. citizens living here make the key decisions for the other half, who
don’t vote but often gripe. The latter category tends to be younger, poorer,
more Latino, renters and less likely to be college-educated than those who vote
regularly.
It’s a pattern almost guaranteed to
arouse classist resentments, and that has been the essence of both the Trump
and Sanders campaigns, as different as they are in many other ways.
This is important stuff if only
because the divides in attitudes and emotion between groups more likely to vote
and those less likely are wider than ever before in the modern era, similar in
some ways to ideological splits in pre-Civil War America – and look where that
led.
Here’s one divide, as determined in
polling this spring by the Public Policy Institute of California: While likely
voters are divided on whether government at all levels should do more to reduce
gaps between rich and poor (51 percent believe government should do more, 44
percent disagree), fully 70 percent of non-voters say the government should do
more. Views of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, follow a similar pattern,
with likely voters almost evenly split between approving it or not. Non-voters
view the law favorably by a 55-36 percent margin. And those are only two of the
differences.
The irony here is that non-voters
consistently want government to do more for them (69 percent said a higher
minimum wage means a lot to them), but those same people do nothing to ensure
that government will perform as they want.
These findings raise a lot of
questions, a key one being how to get more of the non-voters to cast ballots
and actually try to put people who share their views into office.
One way, suggested Democratic state
Sen. Ben Allen of Santa Monica in a recent forum, would be to get more news
coverage of government. But with virtually all Sacramento television news
bureaus closed for economic reasons (political bureaus cost money, but no one ever
bought advertising time because of them) and newspapers operating at bare-bones
levels because of the industry’s slump, that doesn’t figure to happen soon.
Another suggestion is better civic
education in public schools. But try getting high school students to pay
attention in government classes.
That might leave it up to charismatic
candidates to drive the vote and bring usual nonvoters to the polls. If Trump
and Sanders do that in this election, they’ll have made at least one positive
contribution.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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