I asked one of America's top pollsters why 47% did not vote in the US 2016 election. Mindful that this is common to past elections, generally 50% do not vote in presidential election years and fewer in the intervening congressional years, this is what he said, asking for non-attribution at the same time that he agreed his remarks could be published.
1) Nonvoters are mostly (2/3) low information people, struggling to get by. You don't want their vote, because it is an ill-informed vote.
2) This year we saw a further increase in the voter suppression tactics in the states controlled by Republican governors and legislators, who got a bigger choke-hold on states with a lot of small town and rural voters in 2010 off-year elections when they put on a big push to capture them. We're in rural and small town decline in about 20 states across the South, plus the mountain states in the West, and automation of jobs in the industrial Midwest and that's the Red states at the state level vote. It's easy to cast blame on Blacks, Hispanics and ‘furriners' for the decline in their life chances, and to those Trump voters voter suppression and gerrymandering in those states ain't so bad. So I'd guess about 1/3 of that 47% is voter suppression that has the same effect as suppression of the Black vote in the South 50 years ago.
Phi Beta Iota: If Donald Trump wants to be the greatest president of the USA in modern history — equal to FDR, JFK, and Ronald Reagan, he needs to up his political game and break the back of the two-party tyranny. “His” voting block should be everyone other than the blind “base” of the two-party tyranny, which is to say, he should pull the Sandernistas from the left and the Tea Party from the right, rolling in the Constitution, Green, Libertarian, and Reform parties, go for the Independents, and educate the non-voters back into being active citizens. Implemented through an Electoral Reform Act and a Trump Channel, this will give him three things he needs:
01 Survival when the Republican Party collapses from leaked documents that are going to be at least as damning as those from the Democratic Party and John Podesta;
02 Pressure coalitions on incumbent Members who — even when freed of dependency on financial contributions from special interests — are either being blackmailed or pressured in others ways;
03 In 2018, by campaigning actively for selected candidates who agree not to caucus with either wing of the two-party tyranny, a swing vote that enables evidence-based legislation.
See Also:
Steele, Robert. “Donald Trump’s Future — Over Reince Priebus’s Dead Body…,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, January 16, 2017.
Steele, Robert. “The Soft Coup Collapses – CIA Bluffing, Russia Did Not Hack, Blackmail Revealed – What Next?,” Global Research, January 9, 2017.
Steele, Robert. “Former CIA Spy Has A Surprising Christmas Message For Trump,” The Mind Unleashed, December 23, 2016.
Steele, Robert. “Donald Trump, The Accidental President — Under Siege! A Soft Coup Rages within a Closed Rigged System…,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, November 12, 2016.
Steele, Robert. “RIGGED – Twelve Ways the Two-Party Tyranny Rigs the US Electoral System to Block Out Independents, Small Parties, and 70% of the Eligible Voters,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, October 22, 2016.
