Democrats won 'highly engaged' voters and struggled with everyone else in 2024
The final NBC News poll showed Vice President Kamala Harris losing voters who don’t follow politics closely by double digits.
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Unfortunately "highly engaged voters" aren't a large segment of the population. If you want to win elections, you have to cater to the voters who only hear the occasional sound bite and then just make a decision based on vibes and/or what their friends and chosen media propaganda factory tell them.
No, it's not an ideal world, but it's the world we live in, and it's been that way for a long time — more than long enough that the DNC should have gotten it's act together by now. And yet... here we are again...
Things like this are what make me struggle with the question of whether or not some sort of voting license would be a bad thing.
It would, of course, unequivocally be a bad thing. But would it be worse than this? I don't know anymore. On one hand, every living human deserves a free and fair voice in the choice of their governmental representatives. On the other hand, maybe you should have to prove you know what you're voting for before you're allowed to vote. Because a popular vote decided primarily by "vibes" from criminally underinformed voters is not something that any republic is able to survive long term.
I don't think this would have the effect that you want in practice. One of the biggest obstacles Democrats face is getting their own voters to care enough to vote. Republicans, despite being less popular as a percentage of Americans, don't struggle nearly as much getting their supporters to the polls.
Adding additional barriers to voting will decrease voter turnout across the board, and this will absolutely hurt Democrats more than it will hurt Republicans.
That's kind of my point though. The large majority of active voters in America don't have a damn clue what they're actually voting for. Many democrats don't vote, but those who do generally do so because they're informed and invested in politics. Most Republicans vote, largely because their pastor tells them to and tells them who to choose.
If voters were required to have an informed opinion in order to vote, I bet you'd see a significant change in those percentages.
But none of this is practical anyway, it's a bad solution to a bad problem. It's basically unenforceable and any way that it does get enforced is going to be a net loss of rights and representation. I don't like this idea. I just have a hard time coming up with alternatives at this time. It is clear to me that the situation we have now is not tenable. I just don't know where to go from here, and it seems nobody else does either.
Reinvesting in education is really the only way America is ever going to solve the foundational issues with its democracy. Unfortunately, education is now one of the most highly-politicized topics in American culture, so... yeah, not looking great.
