In a democracy based on the universal franchise, the key to waging a victorious political campaign lies in successfully manipulating the passions of the electorate. A candidate does not need to posses logical strategies for governing or even express a coherent policy platform in order to win the support of the uninformed American electorate. As Barack Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign demonstrated, if a politician wants to perpetuate a message that truly resonates with the American public, he need not adopt a mantra any more sophisticated than a line from the Nickelodeon preschool television program Bob the Builder. The American people are certainly not unintelligent. As a body, however, the voting public relies too heavily on sound-bites and cookie cutter promises to make voting decisions and does not demand enough substantive information from its public officials. This flaw in the American political system is certainly alarming, and the question that looms is "can we fix it? . . . Yes we can!"
The drafters of the American Constitution foresaw the inevitable political danger posed by a democracy that allowed an uninformed populous the power to control governmental policy. In the eighteenth century, however, the root of this moral hazard lay principally in a lack of education. The Founders attempted to overcome this risk by limiting the right to vote to white, landholding males. As Thomas Jefferson commented, "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." To avoid the risk of political and social oppression under the guise of majority rule, the founders restricted suffrage to an elite group of individuals which shared a common gender, race, and socioeconomic background. While this may initially appear biased, in reality, those restrictions served to limit the right to vote to those who were the most likely to have received the education that merited them competent to make informed political decisions. Only with the advancement of education could the franchise be extended without fear of a disintegration of democratic ideals.
With the modern American's extensive access to mass media and a well-developed educational system, the danger inherent in an uninformed voter is no longer derived from a lack of education. Instead, the current threat to the preservation of American democracy is principally derived from voter apathy. The disparity between the voter turnout in the presidential election of 2008 compared with this November's state gubernatorial elections perfectly displays this defect. The landslide victory for Republican candidate Bob McDonnell has been viewed by many partisan commentators as a referendum on the Obama Administration. According to Fox News, Obama's Press Secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed the claims as saying the election results "mean very little for the president's agenda or for the midterm elections." Gibbs was right. The election results shifted so heavily in favor of McDonnell not necessarily because the voters changed their mind, but because a large segment of those who supported Obama in the presidential election did not come out to vote in the state races.
This disparity even manifested itself on the Grounds of the University. Last November, the election fervor was fierce. According to a Tufts University exit poll, the youth voter turnout in the 2008 Presidential election reached between roughly 49 and 56 percent. That marks the second highest youth voter turnout in U.S. history. In the 2009 gubernatorial elections, however, less than half that number of youth voters went to the polls. The difference in the outcome of the elections therefore cannot be attributed to a change in the electorate's political viewpoints, but to change in the demographic make-up of the voting bloc. The large voter turnout in the presidential election rendered the election results a realistic measure of the political will of the majority. However, the fact that this same majority lacked the motivation to get to the polls this November should cause every informed citizen in America to question the competency of the decisions made by the apathetic voter.
In a democracy, every election is important, but unfortunately, American politics seems to suffer from the "Little Red Hen" syndrome. Voters are not willing to participate or inform themselves to vote in local elections and yet they still desire to "help eat the bread" in elections they deem important. Despite the ease of gaining information and voting, many American citizens only vote in the elections they deem important or historic. This motivation for voting is both unseemly and dangerous. The greatest number of voters turn out to elect the president, the most powerful position in the nation, and yet these are the most poorly informed and least interested voters. If a voter is not willing to help "bake the bread" of the American political system and turnout to vote in local elections, the voter should hardly be considered vested enough in the American political system to vote competently for the presidency. A substantial minority of Americans are not willing to put in the effort to supply the ingredients necessary for proper democracy, and are willing to risk starving our political system of quality leadership in exchange for personal convenience.
Ginny Robinson's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at g.robinson@cavalierdaily.com.
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