Financially struggling Americans have no interest in participating in a political system that’s failed them

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Episode Summary

We’ve talked a lot on this program about how Donald Trump won the 2024 election due to people who were less engaged in the political process, and the evidence keeps piling up in that regard, including a study released last June by the Pew Research Center.

Before Trump came along, however, so-called “unlikely voters” had strongly Democratic voting preferences, at least according to surveys by Suffolk University in 2012 and 2018.

Figuring out what low-engagement people are thinking about politics is going to become increasingly important as both major parties are trying to move beyond just maximizing their most dedicated supporters.

But understanding why people are choosing not to participate is difficult because Americans with these opinions are often unlikely to answer phone calls from strangers and are less likely to want to take a phone or online survey. That’s why in this episode we’ll be featuring Daniel Laurison, a sociologist at Swarthmore College who just released a new study based on detailed interviews with 144 lower-income Pennsylvanians who do not vote regularly.

The full video of our conversation is available to paid subscribers. You can get unlimited access to this and every other episode on Patreon or Substack. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Related Content

* Flashback: How ‘unlikely voters’ could be the key to the 2024 presidential election

* Flashback: Donald Trump’s bet on non-voters is high-risk, high-reward

* Americans are deeply dissatisfied with society, Democrats must speak to their rightful concerns

* Republicans built an infrastructure to attack democracy, Democrats must build one to protect it

* The decline of black churches and media has indirectly increased black support for Republicans

* How the American left became post-political, and how to change that

Audio Chapters (full episode)

00:00 — Introduction

06:57 — Non-voters feel the political system is for the rich; they’re not wrong

15:50 — Trump constantly takes credit and shifts blame; Democrats don’t

21:07 — Non-voters are choosing not to participate, not being driven away by barriers

28:44 — Republicans stay in touch with voters between elections through advocacy media

36:21 — The loss of third spaces and ways to meet friends and network

44:13 — Democrats have redirected local engagement funds to advertising, and it hasn’t worked

49:01 — Trump’s love of self-promotion matches today’s political need for constant communication

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So this is a really important report, I think, especially given the recent trends we’re seeing in Donald Trump’s approval rating from people—there’s a lot of people out there saying, well, I didn’t vote for this. And they didn’t.

But in fact, he was actually saying what he was going to do in a lot of ways, but they didn’t know. Let’s start though, from the beginning what the larger purpose, behind the report here. And then we’ll start getting into the details.

DANIEL LAURISON: Great. Yeah, I mean, for me, the, the purpose is really to, to first of all highlight the real problem we have in our democracy, which is a lot of people don’t feel, feel included, don’t believe that they’re represented, don’t see anything in electoral politics that reflects what’s going on for them. And that means that a lot of them choose to stay home on election days. And a lot of what we what, what campaigns, what parties, what even civic organizations tend to do to try to bring them out is not necessarily effective. So for me, the most important thing about the report and about what’s going on is that we can’t have an effective democracy if a bunch of people don’t believe that democracy is doing anything for them, him.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, so I mean, with that regard though, I mean, yeah, people, overwhelmingly a lot of people do feel like the, the American political system doesn’t represent them. And they’re not wrong to feel that way. But how, how people are responding to that is very different. And you, you’re looking at the people [00:04:00] who, they’re kind of opting out in a lot of ways, it seems like.

LAURISON: Yeah, I mean, this study is based on interviewing, especially exclusively poor and working class people, or low income and working class people. People who don’t have college degrees and or are earning under $45,000 a year and or are in, manual service, routine working class type jobs, jobs that don’t require college degrees. And so for them, I think part of the. What we call the disconnect is really the class composition of who runs politics, who they see in politics, who they see caring about politics, the volunteers, the politicians, all of that. And so that disconnect as we call it, is, is, is an important way as a class to disconnect.

And that’s something that I think doesn’t get as much attention as we maybe need to give it.

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and one of the things that I think is Im important here is that within, within politics, a lot of people that, that are trying to bring a data-driven approach, quote unquote, to it.

They rely on polls and polls, they’re not as much of a science as people often imagine them to be. And I can say that as somebody who used to be a pollster. And so I’m not hating on it. It’s just that you have only one interaction. It’s a one shot interaction with the person on that topic.

And you don’t know if you phrased it in a way that they understand in the same way. And but then at the same time, people also are doing focus groups and those also have problems as well. And you guys are doing something else.

LAURISON: Yeah, so we did in-depth qualitative interviews. We talked to people for usually about an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. A couple of interviews went up to two hours. And so we could really get a sense in a conversation what, what they meant. if they said something and we weren’t sure what they meant, we could say, what do you mean by that? And we could follow up on stories they told us, or when they said, you. I just don’t like that guy. We could ask what they meant, et cetera. So I think there’s really something to be said for this kind of qualitative research. It’s not something that, that I would expect [00:06:00] a campaign in its final 40 days to be able to do.

But it is something that that makes people feel heard and understood and listened to, and that’s really worthwhile. And for our purposes for research, you just get a different sense of, of. What people are thinking and feeling and what they believe. Then you can with other methods, especially polls.

I’m a person who does both qualitative and quantitative research. I love surveys. I love survey data. But the fundamental feature of a survey is you give people a set of options to take boxes on. And if you’re not asking the right questions, you’re not going to find out what’s going on for them. That’s one piece. And then the other piece is a lot of people just tick the box that sort of seems right in the moment and you don’t have any sense of whether that’s something they believe really deeply, whether that’s something they care really a lot about, whether that’s something that motivates them or if it’s just like the box that appealed in the moment. So again, while I use surveys. I like surveys. I think polls are real information, but there’s some things you just can’t capture unless you’re having conversations with people.

Non-voters feel the political system is for the rich; they’re not wrong

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and especially I think with regard to disengagement and dissatisfaction because everybody has their own things that they’re dissatisfied about. Because, ultimately people who are deciding to vote for someone, there’s, they’re deciding, they’re unifying on that thing of this is who I’m going to vote for, whereas somebody who is not voting. They can have a, a variety, a wide variety of reasons for not participating. Although one of the consistent themes in the research is that people that you guys talk to are, they feel like that politics is for rich people and for people who are, are world apart from

them. and, and you guys have several different case studies in that regard. There.

LAURISON: Yeah, absolutely. And just to go back to the methodology for a second, the other piece that I think is really important is that polls and surveys increasingly just can’t be representative. And qualitative data is never even attempting to be representative because you’re almost never doing random [00:08:00] samples or that sort of thing. But the people who are least likely to respond to polls and surveys are also the people who are least likely to vote. And so you don’t get a good set sample of people who are non voters necessarily, unless you’re really making an effort. And you don’t get a good sample of people who are, who don’t have college degrees, who are low income, who are poor, who are struggling and waiting can take care of some of that, but it can’t take care of all of that.

So one thing we were able to do is use community-based researchers who were from the communities where we were trying to talk to people to bring in their friends and family, to bring in people that they had connections to so that we were reaching people who would never, you know, if a pollster calls you and says, do you want to answer some questions about politics? These are people who would never do that. And they were, some of them were in fact, quite hard to recruit, even with an incentive, even by a friend or family member to talk about politics in an inter interview for an hour. So I think that’s, part of what’s going on for a lot of people is, again, just the sense that politics is not something they’re entitled or qualified to participate in.

Not in the sense of they don’t genuinely know what they need to know, but in the sense of, if it seems like the kind of thing you have to watch the right news, or you have to know the right people or et cetera, then you’re, you’re not going to feel like it’s something you want to talk about for an hour.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and also the way that the economy is increasingly structured for a lot of people what we’re seeing in this research, but also a lot of other research is that a lot of people are having to work multiple jobs. They’re having to they don’t have time to look at this stuff.

And even as early as Aristotle, he was saying politics is something that people who have leisure can participate in. But if you are scraping by constantly, where are you going to have that time? Especially if you have no habit of doing that.

LAURISON: I think that’s part of it, and, and certainly, the efforts that people are making to make voting easier are. [00:10:00] a hundred percent worthwhile. The ma efforts that people are making to, on the other side, mostly to make voting more difficult, I think are, a real problem. But most people we talked to when they were talking about their own reasons for not getting to the polls, it wasn’t about the time that they had or, how convenient it was or finding a car, that sort of thing.

It really was just a sense that either, either there was no point or why would they give their vote to people who don’t care about them or, this is, this is just, I sometimes make the analogy to who’s a football fan and who’s not. Some people, pay a lot of attention to football, love football, talk about football all the time.

Some people, and I’m one of them. Didn’t grow up in a football family. People start talking about football, my eyes glaze over. I don’t have any idea what the thing is that I should say, and I just don’t want to be in that conversation. And I think that politics feels to a lot of people we talk to, the way football feels to me, right?

It’s something that they know other people care about. They know is something that maybe as a good American, they ought to engage with, but they just don’t feel like it’s something that, that they have access to.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, that’s, yeah, that’s true. And that is an important thing to note because there have been people that have, have been trying to talk about this and, and they focus on only on, well, let’s make voting easier, not, well, why don’t you vote? And that’s, it is a serious issue because, especially if you are somebody who is trying to work on behalf of democracy and you don’t like a lot of the tyrannical things that Donald Trump has been doing.

I mean, the reality is his campaign was trying to find these people in 2024 and there were numerous studies that showed that the less that people were paying attention to the news or followed it the more they were likely to support Donald Trump because he was trying to talk to him. He was there in the places that they did watch.

So he was there in the Ultimate Fighting Championship places. And he [00:12:00] was going to football games, and going on lifestyle podcasts talking about just any random thing that they wanted to ask him about. And, and that’s not what you see a lot of Democratic people doing.

What they seem to do is, they’ll do a interview with Morning Joe and they’ll, they’ll have a New York Times op-ed, and then they’ll say, okay, well I’m done. And that’s, that’s just not where these people are. They’re not looking at that media and they never will. And they have the right to. This is a job for people like you and I, but we’re a minority and the people who are political junkies and, really interested in, in these topics, they’re also a minority also.

LAURISON: Yeah, absolutely. And they’re usually also from, not always, but usually from educated families from upper middle class families, more likely to be white, more likely to be men. Here we all are.

And so they’re not as likely to have organic connections to regular poor and working class people across race.

And that’s really, I think, a problem, especially, especially for the Democrats. Trump also in the last election, his campaign not only in terms of media, but also in terms of campaign strategy was knocking doors of people who had very low voter propensity scores. The kind of the kind of doors that don’t tend to get knocked in most standard Democratic campaigns these days.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s true. But it’s, and I want to just go back related to that. So there’s something I asked earlier where you had to address something else, which was good. But you know, just this idea that politics. Is not it, it’s for people who are rich. And when we look at the research of, of compared to, this is the public opinion on X and this is the law that comes from X, that opinion to say that politics is is not about me and that not about people like me, that’s a true opinion

LAURISON: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could, I think there are many politicians who are very interested in making the lives of low income and working class people better. And there are many policies that have been passed, o often by Democrats [00:14:00] that do in fact make people’s lives better in, in some ways, but they’re so often hard for people to see those effects.

You pass a law that results in block grants to the states that results in grants to nonprofits that results in services that people might not otherwise get. But no one receiving those services has any way to see. In fact, even the people working in the organizations often don’t have any way to see that, that, that funding came from a federal grant that was part of a bill that was passed by Democrats a year or two or three ago. And so that, I think you’re, I, I say all that because I, on the one hand, I think you’re right that by and large politics is by and for the wealthy. There are, the people who, politicians are disproportionately wealthy people who work in politics.

There’s a number of books and studies that show that if you look at public opinion by income, the policies that we get tend to reflect either and the beliefs and interests of the people at the top, or when there’s wide consensus, they tend to get implemented.

But the people at the lower end of the income spectrum, if they have policy preferences or, issue, issue beliefs that don’t line up with the issues and the policies that the people at the top care about, they’re much less likely to get implemented. So that’s, that’s absolutely true. The reason I sort of hesitate when you say they’re right, that politics is for the rich, is it doesn’t have to be that way.

It doesn’t have to be that democracy. As it, our democracy in the US only reflects the interests of well off people. And you see examples all over the place where that gets, that’s not the case, right? Where there’s state laws that really do help low income and working class people, where there’s city policies that do that, where there’s, attempts to do things at the national level.

The question is just, how can we make it more in that direction rather than, rather than less.