US election points to growing public alienation
More Americans chose not to vote than cast their ballot for Trump or Harris
AMID all the post-US presidential election analyses, one thing that’s not receiving as much attention as it should is the high percentage of non-voters.
Some 40 per cent of the estimated 244.7 million Americans eligible to vote in 2024 did not do so. This means that “Did Not Vote” accounted for a bigger share of the electorate than Donald Trump or Kamala Harris gained individually. Trump took just over 50 per cent of the popular vote, with some 75 million votes, and Harris 48 per cent (71.8 million).
It would be easy enough to respond by shrugging one’s shoulders and saying, “Well, that’s democracy. If you have the right to vote and you choose not to exercise that right, it’s your fault if you don’t like the outcome. Elections have to be decided according to who votes.”
The problem with that argument today is that it can lead to complacency concerning the general health of political life in democratic countries. It rests on an assumption that those who don’t vote are either too lazy to be bothered or are apathetic about politics. This is certainly true of much of the non-voting public, but there are sound reasons to think that dissatisfaction with all the choices on offer or the electoral outcomes in general played a part in depressing turnout.
Putting the latest US presidential election into a longer-term context lends weight to this interpretation.
This year, just under 61 per cent of those eligible to vote did so, compared with 65.9 per cent in 2020 and 59.2 per cent in 2016. There was a significant anti-incumbency sentiment at work in the last two elections. Joe Biden was not an inspirational candidate in 2020, but people opposed to Trump could rally around him to get Trump out.
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This year, although Trump made gains among certain sectors of the public, in fact his overall vote was not much greater than that in the 2020 election – according to the tally to date, just under 75 million, compared with 74,223,975 in 2020. However, Harris was about 10 million votes down on Biden’s 2020 total (71,524,884 compared with Biden’s 81,283,501 votes). This was with an electorate that has increased by four million since 2020.
Evidently, there were millions of Americans who had been sufficiently motivated to go to the polls in 2020 who were not so inclined in 2024, and the big loser was Harris. Given that there were clearly voters who switched to Trump after voting Biden last time (increases were noted in his support among Asian, Black and young female voters, for instance), it would seem, on his voting figures, that he did not carry over his full 2020 base from election to election.
There are a few conclusions that these figures might suggest.
Harris suffered from being a continuity candidate who had no new policies to project and relied heavily on the fear of a Trump win to deliver her the presidency. She was closely associated, as vice-president, with Biden’s policies and did not go on to distance herself from them or propose alternatives. The US economy overall did well under Biden, but that was not the impression gained by low-wage Americans hit by inflation. This may be the biggest contributor to Harris’ defeat – people making a decision not to vote for her, but, being unwilling to vote for Trump, they simply did not vote at all.
Some Americans – not only Muslim and Arab Americans, but some progressives of other backgrounds – felt sufficiently appalled at the outgoing administration’s policy towards the Palestinians and Harris’ refusal to break decisively with it that they decided not to vote.
In the longer term, there ought to be a modification of the conventional view that US society is sharply divided into two hostile camps of Republicans and Democrats. That division is real enough, but is far from the whole story.
There is a substantial section of the public that does not feel a strong affiliation to one or other of the traditional heavyweight parties, and consequently did not vote. Beyond this, a Nov 6 Reuters report noted that, for the first time since such data was collected, the turnout of self-declared independent voters (34 per cent of voters) exceeded the number of declared Democrats and tied with the the number of declared Republicans.
This suggests that the divisions in US society should not be simplified to a two-way split. The non-voters and self-declared independents who did vote make up a majority of the US electorate, and they are dissatisfied to varying degrees with the dominant parties in the country and, as yet, not convinced by the policies (or perhaps the chances) of any third party, such as the Greens.
The United States is not alone in this regard – far from it.
General elections in Italy, France, Britain and other Western countries in the past 20 years have revealed an ebbing of traditional party loyalties among a base unhappy with existing policies and fed up of being taken for granted. This will make it harder to find societal consensuses on overall policy directions, and provides an opening for anyone offering an attractive-sounding alternative, real or otherwise, better or worse.
A first step in revitalising the democratic order needs to be gaining a realistic understanding of what ails it, which necessarily involves listening to the disenchanted and disenfranchised (as people are when they feel that none of the political parties with a realistic chance of forming a government represents them) with a view to engaging them as active renewers of democratic life.
The writer is a Singapore-based freelance writer
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