[lbo-talk] more nonvoters

[John Lacny]

You can study this stuff to death, but the bottom line is that there is absolutely no doubt that nonvoters -- if they did vote -- would vote in a more progressive direction than the current crop of voters. Republicans oppose even mild efforts to expand the voter rolls for this very reason. They are not stupid. Neither are the organizers of the 527s that are doing massive voter registration right now in the areas that have low turnout. In Pennsylvania at least, I know for a fact that every single one of the 1200 or so precincts that the 527s are targeting are majority-black or majority-Latino.

This is not the same thing as saying that non-voters are all secret revolutionaries whose current patterns of abstention are themselves a progressive political statement. Only a particularly clueless type of academic could come up with bullshit like that. Non-voting is a sign of dispair and non-engagement, not a form of resistance. But it's precisely because these people would defeat the reactionaries if they DID show up at the polls that the Republican strategy is always a voter suppression strategy rather than a voter turnout strategy, and why Republicans will be hoping for bad weather in the swing states on election day. 

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John Lacny
http://www.johnlacny.com

People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!