Why Some Americans Think Voting Isn’t Worth the Hassle

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Turning to the United States now, where Super Tuesday voting is predicted to deliver the clearest sign of a Trump-Biden rematch. With all eyes now set on November, there is one powerful voting bloc that both parties will be targeting. New York Times Magazine reporter Marcela Valdes, joins Harry Srinivasan to discuss the “ambivalent voter and their role in this election.”

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Marcela Valdes, thanks so much for joining us. You wrote a piece recently that was interesting because it wasn’t the undecided voter who’s on the fence on whether or not to vote for President Biden or Former President Trump, but it was kind of the — well, the unmotivated voter, whether or not they would go to the polls. What made you go after this story?

MARCELA VALDES, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: Well, I think that traditionally campaigns have gone after the swing voters, right? The voters who go between parties or between candidates. But as the United States gets more and more polarized, the number of swing voters diminishes. People just don’t want to switch teams. And so, what becomes much more important, winning elections, is trying to capture the vote of what I call ambivalent voters. And these are the people who have mixed feelings about voting. The big question for them isn’t so much, which candidate do they support, but why should they bother voting at all? And there are millions of them. So, on average, since 1920, 42 percent of the American electorate has decided not to vote. And even in 2020, when we had a historic turnout rate, we still had more than 100 million Americans who didn’t cast ballots. So, there’s a huge audience of potential voters that these campaigns can fight for.

SREENIVASAN: So, 100 million, who are these Americans? Who — is it demographically one over the other, you know, by gender, or by race, by geography? What do we know?

VALDES: I think the most important thing that I found out in my research reporting for this article is that the ambivalent voters just aren’t that different from other voters. So, people have, in the past, made a big deal about smaller differences in, you know, income or in education. But the truth is that they’re more like the rest of us than they are unlike the rest of us. For example, a third of them have college degrees. About a third of them are wealthy. Most of them are, you know, they’re similar rates of marriage or church attendance or having jobs as the rest of us. So, this notion that the people who don’t vote or sort of politically ignorant or apathetic or socially isolated is just doesn’t hold up under a lot of scrutiny. And I think the most important thing that I found out is that these voters are actually paying much more attention to politics than people previously thought. So, only about a quarter of these ambivalent voters don’t pay any attention to politics. The vast majority of them are paying some attention to politics. Some of them are paying a lot of attention to politics. Some of them know more about the political scene than people who — than your average American voter. Others are kind of tuning in and out, but they are not neutral bystanders.

SREENIVASAN: So, why don’t they vote then? I mean, especially if you’re paying attention to something, why not kind of follow through and make an appointment or get to the polling station or mail in your ballot, if that’s an option, right? What makes them want to vote? What makes them not want to vote?

VALDES: So, one thing that I think is important to recognize is just voting in the United States is just not that easy. Sometimes, you know, people are less likely to vote if they have to stand in line for the polls for an hour to be able to cast their vote. Voting is not — our election days are not held on a Sunday. It’s not a national holiday. So, really, we’re asking people to take time off their work, to make a serious investment to cast a ballot. And for a lot of ambivalent voters that just doesn’t feel worth it unless two things happen. And one of them is that there’s a really big difference between the candidates. And the other is that there’s significantly anxiety-provoking or just stabilizing events happening on the national or international scene. So, we’re talking about when America enters a war or when there’s a significant change in the economy, like a recession, or when the pandemic happens. Then when the choices are really clear and the stakes of not voting feel really significant, then these ambivalent voters decide, OK, it’s worth it for me to go and invest the time and cast a ballot this year.

SREENIVASAN: OK. So, there’s no shortage of very important topics coming up this fall. But what’s that tipping point between the dynamic where people might be unenthused about the candidates versus really fired up about a topic?

VALDES: I think that the tipping point is going to be very difficult to predict. But you’re right that there is a lot of warring factors going on right now. So, on the one hand, we do have this high candidate contrast. We do have a very anxiety-provoking national international scene right now. But there’s this other factor that affects ambivalent voters a lot, which is that when they don’t like their choices, they don’t act. Basically, if they don’t like what’s being served for dinner, they’re not going to come to the table. And right now, more than half of Americans are expressing unfavorable poll ratings for both Biden and Trump. And so, that’s something that could really end up affecting the vote. And the other change that’s happened since the last election when we had a historic turnout is that during that election, there were a lot of, sort of, temporary measures taken for the pandemic that made voting a lot easier. There were drop boxes for ballots. There was extended early voting. There was no excuse necessary to get a mail-in ballot. I even spoke to somebody in Texas who had drive-through voting, but these are mostly temporary measures. And since then, early voting has actually been curtailed in a lot of swing states, it might be harder to vote this year than it was before the pandemic in 2016.

SREENIVASAN: So, we now have kind of an A/B test, right, of when and where states made it easier for you to vote and what the turnout impact was versus kind of the status quo. I mean, what do we know that actually happens when we make it easier for people to vote?

VALDES: Well, we know, for example, that voting goes up in countries that have election day as a national holiday. That’s a pretty significant documented research that we have about that. And being able to — anytime you lower the effort required to vote, you’re more likely to capture these ambivalent voters because it becomes easier to say, well, it’s not that much of a hassle, I’ll end up doing it. There was a poll by 538 that found that the people who never or rarely vote were much more likely to have had to stand in line to vote for more than an hour in the past. So, that obviously affects people’s calculation about whether it’s not, it’s worth it to make the effort to cast a ballot.

SREENIVASAN: Is there a benefit to one party over another with mail-in ballots?

VALDES: So, some interesting misconception about the ambivalent vote is that many people seem to assume that greater turnout means benefits always the Democrats. But there was a study from Pew that found that people who voted 2020 but didn’t vote in either the midterms of 2018 or the presidential election in 2016, these ambivalent voters were evenly divided between Biden and Trump. So, I think it’s a bit of a misconception to think that, oh, well, if you have increased turnout, that’s always going to benefit the Democrats. No, these voters, precisely because they don’t vote that often, can be very unpredictable in their political opinions.

SREENIVASAN: So, in states like, for example, Michigan, we had results where both Donald Trump and Joe Biden lost a lot of potential voters that could have supported them. In Joe Biden’s case, there were, I think, more than 100,000 people who marked uncommitted, almost a protest vote. And, you know, in Trump’s case, a large number of people voted for Nikki Haley. So, are these people who are signaling to their parties that they’re not happy with these candidates, could they become the ambivalent voters that you’re talking about who choose not to go to the poll at all?

VALDES: Absolutely. And I think from — in the context of this reporting of research that I’ve done, I think the Nikki Haley voters are the biggest wild card of this election. I mean, you know, barring some transformative turn of events, she is not going to get the Republican nomination. But she took — you know, she’s taken significant number of voters in South Carolina, in Michigan, in New Hampshire. And the question for me is, what are these voters going to do after Trump wins the nomination? Are they actually going to go out and vote for him, or are they going to do what so many ambivalent voters are going to do and express their dissatisfaction by choosing not to vote?

SREENIVASAN: You don’t have to necessarily switch teams and vote out of protest for the other, in this case, guy, but just by not voting for your team, you are assisting the other team.

VALDES: It’s still a choice that sends a message, definitely. And, you know, not choosing to vote candidate — for candidate A or B is as clear as a choice as if you had chosen one of them and cast a ballot for them in a way. It’s definitely saying, neither of you got me excited. Now, there is one factor here that could be shifting things a lot, which is that there’s some indications that have come out in the past couple of years, that these ambivalent voters and independent voters may be driven not just by things like the economy and their personal feelings about candidates. That a significant number of these voters may be actually strongly issue-driven. And we saw that in the last midterms when Democrats did a lot better than expected. And the reason why was because the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And there were a lot of voters who were concerned about the future of their medical care for reproductive issues. So, abortion, miscarriages, IVF, these sorts of things. And so, we are already seeing this kind of shape the way the candidates do their messaging. So, ambivalent voters are not going to be responding very strongly to positive messages about the candidates. You know, Joe is a great guy, don’t love the Donald. Those messages aren’t going to have a big effect with them. However, messages about you might be losing something that you care about, something that you feel strongly about is in danger, messages that provoke fear and anxiety are more likely to get people to come out and vote despite their feelings about the individual candidates. And this might be one of the reasons why we’re not really seeing any of the campaigns sell messages of hope, you know, this year.

SREENIVASAN: How does race play into this? I mean, I know that races are not sort of monolithic blocks, if I talk about the Latino vote or the African-American vote, but Democratic Party, for example, over time, has relied more on minority voters. And there are shifting demographics in this country where the Latino population is growing faster than any of the other subcategories. But is there a kind of a Venn diagram or a cross-section of ambivalence across different racial categories?

VALDES: I think the most significant group in this context would be the Latino voters. Because historically, they have had the lowest turnout rate of any of the racial and ethnic demographics. And so — but at the same time, as you point out, it’s a growing electorate, very quickly growing. So, in this year, there will be almost 4 million Latinos who are newly eligible to vote. So, even if 40 percent of them vote, so 60 percent of them stay home, but only 40 percent of them cast ballots, that’s still more than a million and a half new ballots. So, this is one of the reasons why people talk so much about the Latino vote and fighting the Latino vote, especially because this is a demographic that is very complicated politically. They poll very high for Democrats, but the Trump’s support among Latinos has been growing steadily. And because of the low turnout, what’s really going to matter is which candidate can get their supporters to come out more. Like surveys poll — the kind of surveys of opinion aren’t necessarily going to reflect what happens at the ballot box, because it really depends on who’s willing to stand in line to cast ballots. And I saw this in 2020, I was in Florida doing reporting a month before the election. And, you know, Florida ended up going to Trump that year by about 3 percent. So, not a lot. But what I saw a month before election day was serious door knocking campaigns by conservatives to turn out conservative Latinos. The Biden campaign didn’t do any door knocking, they were discouraging door knocking because of the pandemic. But with ambivalent voters, these kinds of face-to-face nudges make a really big difference because they’re not inclined to take themselves out to vote without some kind of extra motivation.

SREENIVASAN: And you also looked at Latino voters in Wisconsin in 2020. Is there something worth learning from that?

VALDES: Yes. I think that, you know, people tend to think of Latino vote affecting places like California or Florida or Arizona. But this demographic has grown so much throughout the United States. So, they’re actually affecting elections in places where you might not expect it. So, there was a very interesting study that came out of UCLA that said that in Wisconsin, you know, Latino voters may have been the X factor. There were — you know, Biden won the state by about 20,000 votes, and there were more than 150,000 registered Latinos. And precincts that had more than 50 percent of their registered voters in that precinct were Latinos were more than four times as likely to go for Biden than for Trump. So, you know, it’s hard to say any one thing made a difference for 20,000 votes, but it’s possible that Latinos delivered Wisconsin for Biden that year.

SREENIVASAN: When you look at this kind of margins, these tiny groups of people that might be motivated that could have swung the election, I also wonder about the younger voters. And you looked at the 18-to-34-year-olds in 2016, and Hillary Clinton famously did not get the vote support from younger people that she needed at that time. Has that changed? Because one of the things that we see almost in election after election is, sure, you can pour a lot of money into trying to motivate young people, but they just don’t end up coming out when it is absolutely necessary. Is that a fallacy? Has that changed?

VALDES: Well, you know, one professor I spoke to at UC Irvine, who’s a specialist in this, told me, the most predictable thing about this year’s election is that the youngest voters will vote the least. It’s what’s true every single time. But a little weakness in this area can still make big differences, especially for the Democrats. So, it’s true that they turn out less, but for Biden in 2020, almost half of the people who voted — who reported voting for him were under the age of 50. He got 60 percent of the youth vote. Whereas Hillary Clinton before had only gotten 55 percent of the vote. But things aren’t looking so good for him this time around. In the recent polls from Gallup, the people who like Biden the least are the people under 34. So, if he loses this vote, we could have an outcome that looks a lot more like 2016, when Trump won, of course.

SREENIVASAN: Marcela Valdes, staff writer at “The New York Times Magazine,” thanks so much for joining us.

VALDES: Thank you for inviting me.