On Mar 12, 2012, at 1:31 PM, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> Eric Beck:
>>> Nonvoters are not all that different from voters ...
>> But that's not the point. The point is that they didn't vote.
> That doesn't sound like "a point" to me; what's the implication
> you're getting at?
> The usual one, which Carl seems to try to make explicit, is that the
> reason the US gets the outcomes we get is because only a small
> percentage of people are required to win an election. Doug refutes
> that, which sounds like a point to me. What's yours?
The point is not that the "poor and powerless," the non-voters, are a [more than potentially] radical-thinking constituency. The point, the only point originally raised, is that a majority of the American electorate sees so little difference between the duopolistic candidates offered to them that they perceive no reason to make the minimal effort involved in voting and therefore abstain.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64