Election season is in full force for the USA with the election in November and Mexico this past June, and for Canada in 2025. The media and talking heads are all exerting maximum energy trying to convince the voters to support their chosen candidate. Millions of dollars are being spent, and we, the voters, are being barraged with solicitations to support their candidate, or the world as we know it will collapse. Extreme factions on the political left and the right seem to dominate the narrative. Moderate positions are rarely expressed as if no one cares or can garner enough support to win using that strategy. We can’t seem to be able to escape this non-stop barrage. It looks as if political individuals start campaigning as soon as they are elected for the next election cycle. Certainly, the survival of the world must depend on our vote, according to the candidates. One wonders if these politicians really do anything except campaign. At the very least, they consider their re-electability in all the legislation they support or do not support.
Many people believe that television has changed the way political candidates are picked. The first televised debate between US presidents was between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in 1960. Prior to then most Americans had only heard their candidates speak over the radio. In 1950 only about 11% of households in the USA had television sets but by 1960 it is estimated that 88% of households had TVs and the audience for the Kennedy–Nixon debate was estimated at 100 million viewers that watched all or part of the debate. Some say that Nixon won the radio debate and Kennedy won the TV debate. Kennedy was assumed to be more handsome than Nixon and Nixon had contracted a cold just prior to the TV debate. These points have been debated for decades which, at its best, was Monday morning quarterbacking. The fact is that TV has become an essential for national candidates to convince voters to vote for them. Prime time TV spots cost money. The current cost for a 30 second prime time spot on national TV ranges from US $200,000 to one million dollars. In 1950 it was between US $2,000 and $10,000. My daughter has been a creative director for several major NYC advertising agencies for several decades and I am blown away about the production time and cost to produce TV commercials. She has told me that it is about “moving the needle” a percent or two. I suspect that is just as true for major candidates as it is for selling beer.
My daughter was among the first to create digital advertising for major clients. Starting a couple of years ago companies began to shift their advertising dollars from print and TV to digital. We have become married to our phones and most of us just Google to get information. Search engines like Google make revenue by selling advertising that becomes the pop-ups that we see when retrieving information. Major candidates started using social media platforms to get their message out during the last two national elections.
Now they are accessing the electorate using social media as well as TV advertising. Of course, face to face is never out of style so now it is all the above.
Given that we are bombarded with information about candidates, albeit tailored to project only their strong points and none of their weaknesses, and point out the opponents’ weaknesses, one would think that every registered voter is ready to do their civic duty and go to the polls on election day and cast their vote. Sadly, that is not the case. According to Pew Research “The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades. About two-thirds (66%) of the voting-eligible population turned out for the 2020 presidential election – the highest rate for any national election since 1900. The 2018 election (49% turnout) had the highest rate for a midterm since 1914. Even the 2022 election’s turnout, with a slightly lower rate of 46%, exceeded that of all midterm elections since 1970.” These numbers show that there are a lot of people that have lost interest, don’t like any of the candidates, or just don’t care. Some don’t think their vote counts anyway given all the controversy about election results in recent times.
I have found voter participation in local elections, where I now vote in El Paso, Texas, to be even worse than the percentages show above. El Paso County had 502,700 registered voters in the 2024 primaries, but only about 11% cast a ballot. That’s more than 7% lower than the last presidential primaries in 2020, and good for the second worst turnout rate in the state. In 2022 general midterm elections, 34% of El Paso’s registered voters cast a ballot, about 10% less than in the 2018 general midterms. The majority population in El Paso County is Hispanic.
In Baltimore, Maryland, where I lived for about 25 years before moving to El Paso, Texas over 22 years ago, the voter participation rate was wavering around 50% in the last statewide election. All the candidates who won received votes from less than 30% of the votes of the registered voters. As a result, they don’t get what they need in their leaders, but what they deserve, because of their apathy.
At one point in my career, I had a partnership with a company in Leuven. Belgium. The director of the company, with whom I had a close personal relationship, commented on this low participation rate of voters in the USA by saying he was both shocked and surprised that the USA had such a low turnout for elections. The Brussels Times reports the following:
Those abstaining or casting invalid votes face a fine
About 10% of Belgians avoided voting in 2019, either by not showing up or casting invalid votes
New political party “Blanco” aims to address this dissatisfaction, calling for empty seats in Parliament
Whatever you might think of Belgium politics, they have a much different take on the responsibility of the electorate to vote.
It seems that almost everyone has an opinion about how dysfunctional their governments are yet many still do not get out and vote. Not voting is really a vote. I wonder how the outcome of many elections would turn out if everyone voted. This would be especially true if they took the time to study the candidates to see how they would fulfill the responsibilities of their respective offices on our behalf. Apathy is not the answer. Get out and vote. Be an informed voter. Don’t believe everything you hear.
- Election Apathy - July 30, 2024
- What happened to our rights? - April 29, 2024
- How much do we control what is going to happen in the future? - April 29, 2024