01 October 19
FOCUS: Bernie's Path to Victory
Eric Blanc, Jacobin
Blanc writes: "Don't worry about the naysaying pundits and polls. Bernie Sanders's road to victory is through mobilizing the kind of voters who don't usually vote. Whether or not he can pull it off is up to us."
Eric Blanc, Jacobin
Blanc writes: "Don't worry about the naysaying pundits and polls. Bernie Sanders's road to victory is through mobilizing the kind of voters who don't usually vote. Whether or not he can pull it off is up to us."
EXCERPT:
The dirty secret of American democracy is how few people take part in elections, especially primaries. Faced with political institutions dominated by the ultra rich, many people understandably feel that it’s a waste of time to participate. In the 2016 presidential primary, for example, the overall turnout was only 28.5 percent — and even this number was significantly higher than normal.
Nonvoters are disproportionately poor, young, and nonwhite. In the 2016 general election for president, more than half of nonvoters earned less than $30,000 yearly, about the same percent were people of color, and 50 percent were under thirty.
Because nonvoters tend to favor redistributing wealth and rebuilding a strong welfare state, the fate of democratic socialist candidates usually hinges on maximizing turnout. By galvanizing just enough new volunteers and voters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her June 2018 primary by besting Joe Crowley 16,898 to 12,880 (out of 241,570 registered Democrats). Bernie is right to argue that “if we can significantly increase voter turnout so that low-income people and working people and young people participated in the political process, if we got a voter turnout of 75 percent, this country would be radically transformed.”
That’s why polls are not prophecy. Not only do they frequently oversample the wealthy and elderly, their projections are based on normal electioneering rather than insurgent working-class campaigns.
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