Power

Despite Media Rhetoric, Election Results Far More About Low Voter Turnout Than ‘Rebuke’ of Progressive Policies

As election results rolled in across the country Wednesday, mainstream media cast the day as a “big win” for conservatives, ignoring that the voting results only reflect the people who made it to the polls, not necessarily the views of the majority or a growing trend ahead of the presidential elections.

As election results rolled in across the country Wednesday, mainstream media cast the day as a “big win” for conservatives, ignoring that the voting results only reflect the people who made it to the polls, not necessarily the views of the majority or a growing trend ahead of the presidential elections. Shutterstock

As election results rolled in across the country Wednesday, conventional and right-wing media cast the day as a “big win” for conservatives and a loss for health care and equality.

At NPR, headlines declared that voters had “rebuke[d] Democrats at polls in another blow to Obama,” before outlining how Kentucky’s election of a Republican governor and Houston’s rejection of an equal rights ordinance show a “stinging rebuke” of “liberal policies.” CBS News wrote that “the generally bad results for Democrats and liberal causes could be an important bellwether of sentiment ahead of next year’s presidential elections.” 

But the so-called victories being hailed as proof of a turn to conservatism tell us more about the effects of low-voter turnout and the values of those who showed up at the polls than they do about any widespread tide-turning against the health-care law or LGBTQ protections. The framing of these election results as indicative of the settled opinions of the majority ignore the abysmally low numbers of voters getting to the polls, and could even encourage those advocating for these issues to sit on their hands instead of engaging to ensure supporters make it there next time.

In Kentucky, Matt Bevin’s gubernatorial win has prompted fears that hundreds of thousands of low-income residents may lose health insurance due to the candidate’s extreme opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). When asked about whether or not he would roll back the state’s Medicaid expansion if elected, Bevin previously said he would: “Absolutely. No question about it. I would reverse that immediately.” Although Bevin has already begun to walk back his position, many are claiming his victory as proof that coming out against the ACA is a winning strategy for politicians.

Yet polls show that even Republican voters largely favor Medicaid expansion. According to a December 2014 poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 52 percent of Republican respondents said they had a favorable view of Medicaid expansion. In states that hadn’t moved to expand Medicaid, support for it was even greater: 56 percent of Republicans said they would be in favor of expansion. As the Wall Street Journal noted, these statistics show that “Medicaid may not be as unpopular with Republicans overall as the conventional wisdom suggests.”

Furthermore, a Blue Grass Poll showed Bevin’s Democratic opposition, Jack Conway, leading the race by 5 percentage points in the days leading up to the election.

The disconnect between this kind of polling and how the election played out may be partially explained by the state’s low voter turnout. Kentucky’s Lexington-Herald Ledger reported, “Although 3.2 million people are registered to vote in Kentucky, less than a million actually cast ballots on Tuesday.” In total, just 30.7 percent of registered voters in the state showed up to the polls.

In Houston, where supposed high voter turnout is being touted as proof that residents don’t approve of the city’s HERO measure, the real story also lies in low participation, with just 26.9 percent of voters actually weighing in at the polls.

To put Houston and Kentucky’s voter turnout numbers into perspective, both fell well under the total number of eligible voters who participated nationwide in the 2014 general elections, which received the lowest voter turnout numbers during an election cycle since World War II, with just 36.4 percent casting ballots. These numbers also coincide with consistently low voter turnout in off-year election cycles for local elections, supported by research from the University of Wisconsin analyzing 144 major cities in the United States.

Some of this low voter turnout could be chalked up to the barriers in place preventing people of color from reaching the polls in the first place. Thanks in part to transportation and accessibility issues, as well as disenfranchisement from voter identification laws, members of marginalized groups are less likely to vote, which in turn has a disproportionate impact on state and local elections.

“Asian Americans, for example, make up 5 percent of the total national population. Whether they vote is almost immaterial to the outcomes of presidential elections,” wrote the Washington Post in an examination of how turnout impacts elections. “However, Asian Americans make up the majority of the population in Hawaii and a third of the population of San Francisco and San Jose. Whether groups like Asian Americans vote could very much affect elections in these places.”

In other words, local and state elections are where the votes of people of color could have the most impact—and where the results from low voter turnout may inaccurately represent the beliefs of the people who actually live there.

Tuesday’s results underscore the roll voter turnout plays across the country. The elections show us what the low percentage of those who were able to access the polls want, not necessarily what the views of the majority are. But that doesn’t mean these elections don’t matter—far from it. In the aftermath of Kentucky’s election, 400,000 residents could lose health care if Bevin follows through on his promises, and it isn’t because that is what Republicans are demanding across the board. In Houston, locals won’t have an ordinance to safeguard against discrimination based on race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, or the other host of protections HERO would have offered. 

Headlines triumphing these election results as shifts in what Americans want as a whole gloss over the majority of the electorate whose voices weren’t heard this week at the polls. The media’s framing of the election results largely failed to note the role low voter turnout played in allowing conservatives to win in the first place, further perpetuating the silencing of those kept from the polls through systemic barriers and potentially discouraging supporters of health care and equality from re-engaging in fights that could have been won if more people had made it to the voting booth.