> Two, there is one small but important area in which this is not true:
> people whom you can register and can then coerce/induce to vote your
> way.
> On the Dem side, union members and poor black churchgoers come to mind.
> This pool of peer-group-coercable people, who can be counted on to vote
> your way if you can drag their asses to the polls, is small. But in a
> tight race, 50,000 such people statewide could matter.
Why assume that union members and poor African-Americans are so robotic? Don't they have brains too? Perhaps their tendency to vote Democratic is due to their having thought about the issues that matter to them and deciding that that's they way they want to vote. (And of course a lot of union members *don't* vote Democratic.)
On the general question of non-voting, it occurs to me that the U.S. system makes it particularly difficult to vote. You have to vote near your residence, and you have to vote on a work day (unlike a lot of other countries, which have weekend voting days). If you have a job that requires a long commute, as many people do, there isn't much time to vote early or late in the day. These facts tend to affect members of the working class more than the rich, who can easily arrange to vote any time they want.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax