Please Stop Telling People to Vote
The non profit industrial complex has civic engagement ass-backwards
In the 2016 presidential election (maybe you remember it) 89 thousand people in Michigan voted but left the presidential portion of their ballot blank. It was, of course, more than enough to have covered the difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the eventual winner. And, as you no doubt remember, Trump would not have won without winning Michigan, a victory that seemingly surprised the Clinton campaign as much as their lackeys in the mainstream media. Hillary could have simply campaigned in Michigan once, but instead her campaign spent the post-election weeks and months looking outward for blame, lashing out at non-voters, Jill Stein voters, and the “undervoters” referenced above. Our supposed party of the working class never misses a chance to blame the little guy for their incompetence (I held my nose and voted for Hillary in 2016. Chill). The narrative was that these people were naive and selfish.
There is, of course, another way to look at the “undervoting” phenomenon, which happened again in 2020, and I expect will happen again this fall, probably at historic rates. Perhaps people were disgusted with the options made available to them. Perhaps it was an act of noble protest against a system that served up two candidates who clearly could not care less about ordinary people. And maybe they actually cared about their State Rep race, their county commissioner, their mayor, but couldn’t bring themself to choose either Presidential candidate; two elderly, wealthy, corrupt coastal elites who couldn’t be more distant from the average Michiganders life. Committing to an act of protest takes courage, and in an environment where everyone on both sides was screaming about it being the “most important election of our lifetime” leaving the top of a ballot blank, if nothing else, took a little courage.
Every four years, the non profit industrial complex “GOTV” apparatus whirrs to life. Right now money is falling from the sky for “voter engagement” work. Organizations are staffing up, hiring canvassers, “organizers”, and back end administrative staff to manage data. If you like this kind of stuff, you can carve out a nifty little career for yourself in “voter engagement” and “voter education”. Don’t forget your lanyard. In swing states like Michigan, this infusion of cash often acts as a lifeline for non-profit organizations, allowing us to mobilize around GOTV in the short term and ramp up our organizing in the long term. At least in theory. In practice, I’ve begun to doubt how effective it is.
Of course a civically engaged populace is a noble goal, right? And certainly no one would argue that efforts to increase voting among historically underrepresented portions of the populace are misguided, again, at least in theory. There are well intentioned, noble people working hard in this field, no doubt. But what purpose does all of this money really serve, in the end? And is a populace that shows up to vote out of a sense of obligation, without any real sense that it matters, and perhaps even with a lingering feeling of resentment about it, really a good goal?
In an ideal world every American would be politically engaged year round, showing up to city council and school board meetings. She would have at least a loose grasp on the problems facing her family and community and who had the power and money to do something about it. Presidential politics would be important, but not particularly more so than other elections, and she wouldn’t pay significantly more attention to it than, say, her state house race or the race for her cities mayor. She would have time to be involved in various political efforts according to her values and priorities, perhaps occasionally organizing a petition drive or canvassing for some local ballot initiative. This wouldn’t be seen, in the ideal world, as anything out of the ordinary. Most people would do it.
In an ideal world our elected officials would see this level of engagement and feel immense pressure to be responsive to their constituents. They would show up to high school football games, coffee hours after church, local diners and coffee shops, and block club meetings, where they would expect to have demands made of them by ordinary people. These ordinary people would feel empowered, by a culture of civic engagement, to talk to their elected representatives as peers, and to make demands of them, as an employer does to his employee (this is, after all, how a democracy is supposed to work).
When we say “civic engagement” this is what many of us picture. And it’s a beautiful picture, a world I am willing to work hard for, to sacrifice for. But it’s obviously far from the world we have, and I fear that all the civic engagement money that is thrown around and infrastructure that has been built is getting us farther away from it, not closer.
I’ve been around this industry long enough to have had a handful of similar conversations often enough that I develop a sense of Deja Vue. One of them involves this sort of voter engagement effort. In fact, I had it again a couple weeks ago in a diner in Traverse City. The guy who I was having coffee with was telling me about the voter program he was “building out” (there’s always weird jargon that pops up like a parasite) for 2024. He said something like: “the idea is to use voting as a hook to move people in to longer term organizing and action around real issues”. I’ve heard it before. A tempting idea. A tempting idea especially when you’re getting a healthy chunk of change from some foundation or another for “voter work”. Unfortunately, I no longer think it works.
If we could use “voter education” to move people in to real organizing I would be all for it, but I’ve never quite seen it happen. Instead, organizations get some chunk of money to build a voter engagement program over a certain period of time. They hire someone to manage data, and use a bunch of the money to throw events and pay canvassers. These canvassers knock x number of doors in y neighborhood, usually a majority minority neighborhood. Afterward they get pizza and pop. The events are usually some sort of candidate forum. People fill out voter registration forms, take information on their polling location, and sign pledge cards promising to vote. As long as everyone meets their “metrics” everyone is happy. The day after election day the pizza boxes get broken down and the voter pledge cards get recycled. See you in 2 (4?) years.
I’ve come to believe that it’s not really possible to move a meaningful number of people into real, deep, civic engagement if we start by pushing them to simply vote. I think, unfortunately for the funders and the non profit industrial complex, regular people can see through this ruse. They’re smarter than you think. Maybe they don’t know exactly where the money is coming from, and maybe they don’t know exactly what our “metrics” are, but they know someone with deep pockets is paying us to hand out a certain number of pledge cards, or get a certain number of voter registrations. And they rightfully don’t see filling them out as an act that’s particularly connected to their every day life. They’ll humor us and fill it out, and we can always meet our metrics, but they’re not going to stick around for an organizing meeting most of the time. And, in fact, we’ve seen diminishing returns on the investment in voting to begin with. People become motivated to vote by getting involved in civic life, not the other way around.
Here’s a hard truth: you only have so many chances to show people that you care about them, really care. If you burn up your first contact on an interaction that they can tell is entirely transactional, you might never get a chance to have another one. This is what I worry is happening. We’re talking to people who could eventually grow in to leaders and connectors in their community, and we’re asking them to “just vote”. And “just vote” is what they do.
So why do we do it? Why do we take a machine gun to our foot every few years like this? Follow the money.
The non profit sphere is dependent, in an unhealthy way, on grants from massive foundations. Foundations you’ve heard of and haven’t heard of. Foundations with endowments in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Not to get all conspiracy minded but do we really think the people that fund and run these foundations, regardless of their “progressive” bona fides, want to see a structural transformation of American society? Do we believe that, deep down, they want poor and working class people to have power, real power? Or would they rather have them just vote, just participate in, and reinforce, the current system. Once every two or four years.
The dirty secret is that the Democratic Party and the non-profit industrial complex have become intertwined, and it obviously all goes back to money. The same coastal elites funding our “non-partisan” GOTV efforts are maxing out their donations to Chuck Schumer and organizing Super PACs for Joe Biden. It’s a disgusting state of affairs but it’s reality. And of course no major political party ever really wants an engaged electorate. What they’d like is for ordinary people to vote for them and then go back to their lives. It’s easier for them that way. Easier to ignore rising inequality. Easier to write blank checks to the war machine (This, of course, goes for the Republicans as well as the Democrats. I write here about the Democrats only because that’s the party that the non-profit sector has climbed in bed with).
We should stop playing in to their hands and badgering people to vote every couple years while ignoring their problems in between. This means having some tough discussions and decisions about our funding. It might mean cutting back on our voter turnout efforts. But I think we’ve been doing things ass backwards for long enough and it’s hurting more than it’s helping. Instead of trying to move people into organizing by getting them to vote, we should do the exact opposite. There are no shortcuts to a truly engaged populace.
If we want people to vote, and know about what they’re voting for and be able to hold their elected officials accountable between elections, we have to do the arduous, time consuming work of organizing from the ground up. We should start by talking to people, listening to them in the places where they are, about the problems in their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. The problems affecting them and their loved ones. Get them together to build power to do something about it. Don’t even think or talk about elections or voting. Instead, organize research meetings to figure out who has the ability to make the changes we want, and invite them to talk with us. Make a demand. You know, basic, long term organizing stuff. People will naturally learn some political lessons through this process. They might learn that their local mayor is an asshole or that the county commission is cutting funding to a program they care about. I promise that these are better, more sustainable motivators to vote than any presidential campaign ad or pledge card. If we go through this process with people, maybe we will learn to hold national level politics more loosely and become more invested in what’s happening in our own back yards. Maybe they’ll even vote but leave the top of the ballot blank.
The counter to this sort of thinking inevitably is that we simply don’t have time for this long term strategy. That this is The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes and that we have to get people out to vote asap. You’ll forgive me if I don’t find that persuasive having heard it about every election since 2000. And I would say there’s no time better to start a longer term strategy than the present! Besides, how well has the current plan worked?
No shortcuts.
There’s a huge number of Americans out there, most of them poor and working class, who have looked around, seen their quality of life declining year over year, seen their livelihoods torn from them, seen their community disintegrating, and concluded that politicians, whatever party they come from, simply don’t give a shit about them or the people they love. They’re not wrong. Instead of telling them not to trust their gut, maybe we should try to help them solve the problems. If they end up voting as part of it, that would be icing on the cake.
I’m not a professional writer. Any paid subscriptions will be used as donations to fund my organizing work in urban and rural Michigan. If you’d like to donate directly to that work you can do so HERE