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How Much Does Your Vote Matter?

Vote Ballot Election USA Canada VOTING BLOC

The US Midterm elections are over and everyone is talking about the results. Here in Ontario, Canada, we also recently had Municipal elections. A common thing I notice that people are talking about is how frustrating it can be, and how often it feels like their vote simply doesn’t matter. Well, whether your vote matters depends on which “voting bloc” you belong to – despite what you were taught in school, not all votes are created equal!

For those who don’t know, for the sake of analysis, voters are usually split into “voting blocs”, a demographic groupings of people most likely to vote the same way on this or that issue, or have similar voting patterns. Politicians analyze these voting blocs and tailor their campaign to try and get enough support to get a majority vote.

Major voting blocs are “core Republican” or “solid Democrat” voters, or “straight”/”partisan” voters. These are people who always vote for Liberals/Democrats, or those who always vote for Conservatives/Republicans. They generally speaking, represent about 15-20% of total voters for both sides, so about 30-40% of all votes are decided even before any election campaign starts. The people who can be persuaded to vote for either party are called “swing voters”, and who they vote for will change from year to year depending on the candidates and the issues.

Now, one would think that the core voters are instrumental in a party’s success, because they represent a big chunk of the votes they need to get to win (51% in United States, and a much smaller percentage in Canada due to our multi party system). But in a very paradoxical way, how much effort and energy politicians spend trying to convince a bloc to vote for them depends on how generally disloyal a bloc is to a party. Think about it – a core Conservative voter isn’t going to go vote for Liberals. And the reverse is true. So because these votes are already decided, it makes no sense to waste energy and money trying to convince these people to vote! Meanwhile, the swing voters, while a much smaller percentage of total votes, are the target of political campaigns. Elections are won by rather thin margins.

Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential Election by having just 4% more votes than Donald Trump. Actually, Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election with fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, due to the way candidates win states, and each state grants a certain number of electoral seats, in order to avoid more populous states from overwhelming less populated states.

This is how various minority groups have come such a long way in Western Democracies, because once a small group organizes a voting bloc, the first party to recognize that can use this group to win elections. This is also how the Democrat and Republican parties “switched”, taking their core supporters for granted for so long that in the effort to expand their voter base, they left their core voters wondering if they even represented their interests, and giving the opposite party a chance to start stealing the “core”.

This is also why so many Conservative politicians now have policies aimed to appeal to LGBT and immigrant issues, even though the interests of little-c conservative voters are at odds with the issues of those groups. So long as the Conservative politicians remain just a bit more conservative than the Liberal ones, it doesn’t matter to their core base!

This is also why so many Liberal politicians are in support of war efforts, including the sending of billions of dollars worth of weapons and machines of war to Ukraine. This is despite little-l liberals generally speaking being pacifists and anti-war. In Canada specifically, there is a large Ukrainian diaspora (largest in the world outside of Ukraine actually), and they are a Conservative voting bloc – so by supporting Ukraine in the war, Liberals are hoping to flip that bloc to become a liberal voting bloc

Let people VOTE sign

Politicians today generally speaking have their core voting blocs on lockdown, as they constantly run try to highlight the most awful examples from the other side, and constantly talk about nightmare scenarios of what the opposing party is going to do. But the truth is, a lot of it is exaggeration, or is going to come about regardless of which party wins. The parties aren’t that different, and part of it is because they are both competing for the same swing voters. So being a swing voter, not giving in to the fear-mongering but instead calmly and rationally looking at the exact platforms and how they benefit you will make all the parties try to work for you – thus making your vote count more.

People with PROTECT MY VOVE signs

Another important way to send this kind of message is not to vote at all. As paradoxical as it sounds, not voting sends a similar kind of message to the parties – that if they want your vote they will have to work for it. Voter turnout is very low in both United States and Canada, and one of the reasons for Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 elections was his ability to bring up voter turnout, by hammering on core Republican issues and motivating the people dissatisfied with the party to show up and vote for him. Likewise, Hillary Clinton brought in 7 million fewer voters than Barack Obama did in 2012. While both Obama and Trump had the premise of bringing something different to the table, Clinton had too much of a reputation as a neoliberal warhawk – exactly the kind of candidate a liberally minded voter doesn’t want to vote for.

Donald Trump With Kalashnikov SMG Sub-Machine Guns: “I’LL BE BACK…” Vinyl Sticker / Printed Vinyl Decal
Tags: electionmatters

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