Senator Bernie Sanders is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency. As he has risen in the polls, so has a theory about elections: The key to a progressive victory is motivating previous nonvoters to show up at the polls.
"To defeat Donald Trump," Sanders proclaimed at a recent rally in Exeter, New Hampshire, "the simple truth is we are going to need to have the largest voter turnout in the history of American politics. That means we are going to have to bring people into the political process who very often have not been involved in the political process." The senator's most famous surrogate, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, put the point more succinctly at a rally in Las Vegas: "The swing voters that we're most concerned with are the nonvoters to voters."
The logic underlying this theory is that Americans who are eligible to vote but rarely do so tend to favor leftist policies. A new survey of 14,000 Americans, conducted by the Knight Foundation, provides the best data available so far to test that hypothesis. The answer given by the study is unambiguous: "If they all voted in 2020," the report concludes, "non-voters would add an almost equal share of votes to Democratic and Republican candidates."
Nonvoters are in fact somewhat more likely than voters to be brown or black: While 10 percent of voters are black, 13 percent of nonvoters are. And while 11 percent of voters are Hispanic, 15 percent of nonvoters are. But among nonvoters, the overall share of people of color is quite small: Nearly two out of every three nonvoters are white.
Nonvoters are also far less progressive than is commonly believed. They are more likely than voters to support constructing a wall on the southern border with Mexico, less likely to support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, less likely to support abortion rights, and less likely to favor gun control. Nonvoters do skew left on some important economic issues, such as support for a higher minimum wage. But on the defining cultural issues of the moment, they are markedly more conservative.
In light of their views on public policy, it is hardly surprising that nonvoters are not particularly likely to describe themselves as liberal or to say that they favor the Democratic Party. Among voters, 38 percent consider themselves Democrats and 30 percent Republicans, for a differential of eight points. Among nonvoters, 31 percent consider themselves Democrats and 26 percent Republicans, for a differential of only five points. The ideological breakdown of nonvoters is even more revealing: A clear majority of them consider themselves either moderate or conservative; only one in five say that they are liberal.
What Nonvoters Want
Boosting turnout won’t necessarily help the most progressive candidate.
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Yascha Mounk on Twitter
“@TheAtlantic This is important: With Bernie the presumptive nominee, Dems will stake their chances of beating Trump on the idea that they can mobilize a lot of nonvoters. As AOC recently said, "The swing voters that we’re most concerned with are the nonvoters to voters.” So let's test it.”
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