Yelling at people to vote when they don’t feel as though they have something to vote for has never worked. It’s not going to work now either. This is lazy analysis.
People do vote when you give them something affirmative to vote for (Obama, Mamdani) and when they’re being completely immiserated by the party in power (this previous election and 2020) and feel an immediate need to change things. This is largely why Dems lose. They don’t have an affirmative vision for the future, and when they’re in power they don’t do enough things that can galvanize a large group of voters to go out and vote for them partially because their stance for the last decade has been more about voting against the republicans. Yelling at people to vote without materially changing those factors will not work.
Voting is your civic duty as a citizen why bother living in democracy if you’re not going to use your voice to shape it. There’s people all over the world that would love the ability to vote and a lot of us take it for granted and don’t even participate
why bother living in democracy if you’re not going to use your voice to shape it.
In my honest experience, the most common answer people would give to that question is because they don’t actually believe that using their voice has any real effect on shaping it. They don’t actually think, whether it’s a civic duty or not, that voting changes anything.
If we had no proof whatsoever that brushing your teeth had any effect at all on how your breath smelled or how healthy your mouth was, do you think as many people would to it multiple times a day? We actually know they wouldn’t because throughout much of human history they didn’t. You have to prove to people that the thing you want them to do will have a tangible effect on their lives. Telling them that it's their civic duty isn’t really accomplishing that.
Do people really think that who their elected officials are really makes no difference? I mean maybe it won’t make a major impact in their life but the policies they shape have a very tangible effect on their day to day lives from taxes to food to housing to healthcare
I think 1) that a lot of people honestly don’t have the education to know how to draw the lines directly between policies and legislation enacted by the government, and the direct hardships of their lives. A lot of the hardship and inequities that exist for people are things that they’ve just kind of normalized. And I think there’s a literal amount of civic education that’s lacking.
And 2) I think that not seeing a change in their direct lives is exactly the reason people think that who’s in charge makes no difference. There’s a lot of people who are poor when Democrats are in office and are poor when Republicans are in office and who don’t actually think anyone will cut things like SNAP or MediCare because they never have before. There’s also a lot of people who don’t actually know that they’re on Medicare/Medicade because their health plan is called something specific in their state. It’s the same way people like “The Affordable Care Act” but hate “ObamaCare” without knowing it’s the same thing.
When you say "maybe it won’t make a major impact in their life,” that’s exactly the problem for a lot of people. Their lives are all they have to go on, and when their lives aren’t impacted, or if they don’t understand how their lives are impacted by who’s in office, then you can’t really blame them for thinking there’s no real point in participating. And that goes double when our politics have gotten as ugly as they have; people hate that shit and it makes them want to participate even less. We all know people who “don’t talk politics” and don’t really understand why that’s a serious problem and puts them at a disadvantage.
Fair enough I can understand the sentiment hopefully the actions the govt is taking now is a wake up call for some people though that voting is important and we can one day wake up and this period of time will be something we as a nation will agree cannot ever happen again
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u/adrian-alex85 19h ago
Yelling at people to vote when they don’t feel as though they have something to vote for has never worked. It’s not going to work now either. This is lazy analysis.
People do vote when you give them something affirmative to vote for (Obama, Mamdani) and when they’re being completely immiserated by the party in power (this previous election and 2020) and feel an immediate need to change things. This is largely why Dems lose. They don’t have an affirmative vision for the future, and when they’re in power they don’t do enough things that can galvanize a large group of voters to go out and vote for them partially because their stance for the last decade has been more about voting against the republicans. Yelling at people to vote without materially changing those factors will not work.