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Could Poorer Voters Determine the Outcome of the 2024 Election?
The Poor People’s Campaign is organizing to push the concerns of poor and low-income people into the center of the 2024 political debate.
Feb 20, 2024
Amidst all the nail-biting uncertainty over the 2024 election, one thing’s for sure: Turnout will be key. This February, the Poor People’s Campaign announced plans to mobilize a powerful yet often overlooked voting bloc: the 85 million eligible voters who are poor or low-income.
The campaign crunched the numbers and determined that if this bloc voted at the same rate as higher-income voters, they could sway elections in every state. But most voting drives—and candidates—still ignore this segment of our society.
“The conventional wisdom—which isn’t very wise—is that the poor don’t care about voting,” said Poor People’s Campaign Policy Director Shailly Gupta Barnes at a February 5 press conference. “But that’s just not true.”
In Arizona, 40% of voters are low-wage—and in 2020 the margin of victory was just 0.03%.
What’s the biggest factor discouraging low-wage people from exercising this basic right?
“Political campaigns do not talk to them or speak to their issues,” explained campaign co-chair Bishop William J. Barber II. “In our election cycles sometimes we have 15, 20 debates for president. In 2020, not one of those—not 15 minutes—was given to raising questions about how the policies of that particular party or politician would impact poor and low-income people.”
The Poor People’s Campaign is organizing to push the concerns of poor and low-income people into the center of the 2024 political debate. Their goal is to mobilize 15 million “infrequent” poor and low-income voters.
Will politicians listen?
At the press conference, pollster Celinda Lake ticked off one battleground state after another where even a small increase in participation could determine the outcome. She pointed out that in Arizona, 40% of voters are low-wage—and in 2020 the margin of victory was just 0.03%. “You’d have to be a moron to not get this,” Lake said.
What are some of the most pressing issues on the Poor People’s Campaign agenda?
The campaign and the Institute for Policy Studies just co-published fact sheets for the nation and all 50 states on the interlocking problems that hit the poor hardest: poverty and inequality, systemic racism, ecological devastation, and militarism. Several speakers spoke about these problems from their own personal experiences.
“I’m tired of companies and billionaires buying politicians who are pushing people deeper into poverty and debt,” said Matthew Rosing of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “I’ve put up with the thankless toll of minimum wage retail jobs and back-breaking construction jobs in a state that has 19 billionaires. And because of our flat tax, they pay the same state income tax rate as I do.”
Linda Burns, a former Amazon warehouse assembly line worker, has struggled for basic labor rights and decent healthcare benefits. Burns was a supporter of the valiant union drive at the Bessemer, Alabama, facility that Amazon eventually crushed through harsh intimidation tactics.
Burns says she was fired for her union activity, which led to the loss of her health benefits right before a needed surgery related to a workplace injury. Today she works 16 hours a day as a caregiver.
“I’ve worked too hard to have nothing,” said Burns. “We have to stand up for our rights.”
Veronica Burton spoke about the economic gulf in her community of Beloit, Wisconsin. A woman who lives “around the corner” from her is a billionaire while Burton is struggling to pay bills in the face of multiple rent increases and the low wages she earns at an understaffed child-care center.
On top of dealing with her own problems, Burton often finds herself trying to help parents of the children under her care. “We’ve had mothers unenroll their children because they can’t afford their asthma medicine,” she said.
These and other organizers in more than 30 states are ready to put on their door-knocking shoes in the lead-up to this year’s election and beyond. “We are not an insurrection,” Bishop Barber said. “But you better believe we are a resurrection—a resurrection of justice and love and righteousness.”
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We Know That Wannabe Dictator Trump Can Win in 2024—So What Is to Be Done?
With only 11 months to go, this feels like the political crisis of our lifetimes. Where is the resistance we need?
Dec 06, 2023
I finally put up my Christmas lights on Saturday, in a T-shirt with no jacket on a warm December afternoon — a fitting finale to Earth’s hottest year on record. Meanwhile, the world’s life-or-death climate summit is presided over by an oil dictator who insists there is “no science” to support phasing out fossil fuels. For those who wonder if humankind is taking global warming seriously, the joke of holding COP28 in the United Arab Emirates is your answer.
Nearly seven years later, it’s easy to forget how remarkablethe first Women’s March that occurred on Jan. 21, 2017, truly was. The most incredible thing was the size of the protest that occurred on the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s believed that at least 470,000 people attended the main event in Washington, D.C., but satellite protests across the United States and globally drew an estimated 5 million, likely the largest one-day event in American history.
That success resonated for the next four years, as thousands went back to their hometowns and organized political groups that loosely were hailed as “the Trump resistance” — not only staging local protest events but ultimately knocking on doors and sending out postcards by the millions as Democrats reclaimed the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020.
But there’s also something else worth remembering about that initial Woman’s March and the early days of those resisters. Their movement was born in the early morning darkness and frustration of Nov. 9, 2016, amid the shock realization that a dangerous demagogue had somehow been elected the 45th president of the United States. The rage that flowered on a chilly January day in a field of pink “(p-word) hats” was in part regret that more had not been done to stop Trump before the election.
Today, Trump is back, and no one calls him a demagogue anymore — because that’s too polite. The 47th presidency he envisions is tyrannical, even dictatorial — siccing zealous MAGA prosecutors on his political enemies and the media, pardoning 2021′s insurrectionists, mass detention camps for deporting migrants, and calling out troops to put down protests, perhaps as early as his Inauguration Day. And yet he is all but guaranteed the GOP nomination, and an even-money bet against President Joe Biden next fall. Even a normally cautious mainstream media is starting to get it.
“Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” blared Monday’s headline across the New York Times homepage, describing how Team Trump has learned from the failures of its leader’s more outlandish ideas in 2017-21. A super-long Washington Post essay from neocon scholar Robert Kagan — “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” — was that paper’s most-read article. Not to be outdone, The Atlantic dropped a special issue with 24 separate stories about the dangers of a Trump 47.
It’s great journalism, but will it make any more difference in 2024 than the supposedly fatalAccess Hollywood tape did in 2016? What about the millions of casual voters who don’t know The Atlantic from Popular Mechanics, who’ve convinced themselves that America was better during Trump’s somewhat constrained first term than under Biden in a moment of global chaos?
Even more to the point: Where is “the Trump resistance,” now that we know how truly dangerous the man is — and that he can win again?
Few will argue that some groups have faded and some disappeared after the Democrats’ 2020 victories. Here in Philadelphia, for example, Tuesdays with Toomey is gone, its mission of flipping a Pennsylvania Senate seat accomplished. The American University sociologist Dana Fisher — author of 2019′s American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave— told me “I have been tracking many of the groups and some are shells of what they were” — such as the Women’s March organization — “and others are limping along trying to keep funding.”
But some groups are still going strong, three years after Trump left the White House. Vicki Miller, the group leader of Indivisible Philadelphia, told me her members still chat regularly on Zoom. Although there is the occasional protest — including a boisterous street-corner condemnation on the Jan. 6 insurrection anniversary — the focus is heavily on voter turnout, including postcards and phone banking around last month’s Pennsylvania Supreme Court race won by Democrats, as well as lobbying the state’s U.S. senators. Miller said members still sign up for Door 35, a pledge to knock on at least 35 neighbors’ doors to woo undecided voters.
“It’s sad,” Miller said of those early polls showing Trump tied or narrowly ahead, but she was quick to add, “it doesn’t change what we are doing, which is working our tails off to get Joe Biden and Senator [Bob] Casey elected.” She also believes talking to voters about the things that affect them personally, like reproductive rights or, if done the right way, the economy, is most important — more so than hyping the Trumpian threat to democracy.
Maybe. But with only 11 months to go, this feels like the political crisis of our lifetimes, and I can’t stop wondering if there is more to be done before Election Day. Voter turnout is indeed the most critical, but should there be protests or maybe teach-ins to raise awareness for that true sliver of undecideds? Should there be boycotts of companies whose CEOs support Trump (also known as the Yuengling spit-take)?
As I write this on Monday night, “dictator” is a trending topic on X/Twitter. It could be trending nightly if the too-silent majority of Americans who believe in democracy don’t take a more forceful stand. The moment for resisting Trump is right now, not waiting until Jan. 21, 2025.
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Why Is Biden’s Medicaid Office Holding Out on Voter Registration?
Several states have attempted to implement automatic voter registration based on Medicare enrollment—but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is still stalling.
Jul 16, 2023
Recent efforts to expand access to automatic voter registration are again calling attention to old promises by the Biden administration to enhance the accessibility of civic engagement and continued failures by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to actualize them. Even this week,
a piece in the magazine Bolts highlighted how a holdout by Biden officials continues to stall efforts to support low-income residents in registering to vote, despite recent Oregon legislation to automatically register Medicaid enrollees.
A 2021 Executive Order by President Joe Biden sought to promote access to voting, particularly by “expanding access to voter registration and election information,” in a directive to agencies to provide additional access to voter registration with services that directly engage with the public. Automatic voter registration through Medicaid enrollment offices is a common-sense way to expand opportunity for civic engagement among those most likely to be excluded by current voter registration infrastructure and enables the National Voter Registration Act to move towards achieving its full potential.
Automatic voter registration (AVR) has proven effective in increasing voter registrations across a myriad of states—and not just by the number of voters registered, but in ensuring that the registered voter population is more diverse. And states like Oregon, Massachusetts, and Colorado have worked to take this even further, through AVR for Medicaid recipients.
The holdout by Brooks-LaSure, and CMS more broadly, stands in stark contrast with explicit steps set out by President Biden to improve accessibility to voter engagement.
And despite what the wishy-washy response from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on the issue might indicate, AVR based on Medicaid enrollment has tremendous potential:
- Medicaid already verifies the core information used in voter registration records, such as name, date of birth, address, and citizenship status, and can therefore easily process existing information for registering voters, without introducing additional questions, paperwork, or tricky-to-navigate processes.
- AVR through Medicaid enrollment also maximizes potential for all eligible voters in a household to be registered. Compare this to singular voter registrations processed at the Departments of Motor Vehicle (DMV) which might exclude eligible voters within a household as the DMV only interfaces with the individual there, rather than a whole household’s information like with Medicaid enrollment.
- Historically, Medicaid enrollment has been negatively correlated with voter registration and voting; here’s an easy way to address that disparity to increase civic engagement access for low-income Americans.
- Using Medicaid enrollment for AVR has the potential to make voter registration significantly more diverse, as Medicaid beneficiaries are more likely to be people of color, female, and low-income than the rest of the eligible voter population. While AVR at DMVs has been successful in the past, it still misses many eligible voters who don’t interact with the DMV, particularly low-income folks and people of color.
- In many states, Medicaid does annual enrollment updates, which results in voter information being more regularly updated and a registered voter population that is more accurate, compared to data from the DMV that is updated much less frequently.
Despite the overwhelming positive evidence of improvements to voter registration infrastructure, CMS has taken no action to enable states that have passed legislation to actually use Medicaid for automatic voter registration. In a response to a letter from Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) in support of Colorado’s Medicaid efforts, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure expressed aversion to the use of Medicaid for voter registration, citing conflict with Medicaid privacy concerns. CMS rules currently prevent Medicaid agencies from using enrollment data for non-Medicaid purposes, but CMS can waive these provisions to implement certain proposals at the state level. Even prior CMS officials have indicated support for state-based health insurance exchanges facilitating voter registration.
The holdout by Brooks-LaSure, and CMS more broadly, stands in stark contrast with explicit steps set out by President Biden to improve accessibility to voter engagement. And CMS has resisted fully stepping into its authority in a number of other Executive Orders and actions called for by President Biden—notably, but not limited to the Executive Order on Competition in its calls for coverage for generic drugs and biosimilars. The far-reaching authorities and impacts of CMS, and its role in healthcare for all Americans, deserve additional scrutiny and oversight from the Department of Health and Human Services.
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