During a contentious campaign cycle — like the one we are in now in West Virginia — there are an overwhelming number of advertisements, campaign appearances, news reports and punditry. Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows there is an election.
But how many West Virginians will vote?
One of the most important factors during early voting and on Election Day is always turnout. Campaigns have two objectives — convince voters to support them, and then make sure they get to the polls.
In the bad old days of campaigns in southern West Virginia, candidates had to pay individuals who then handed out cash and liquor to secure votes. “A dollar and a swaller,” as they used to say.
In the 1960 West Virginia Primary Election, won by future President John F. Kennedy, the joke was that Kennedy’s father told him not to spend one dollar more than necessary because he wasn’t going to pay for a landslide.
Today, candidates must rely on their messaging while appealing to voters’ sense of civic responsibility to motivate supporters. The results are modest.
For example, for the Primary Election in 2020, the last presidential election year, 449,077 West Virginian’s voted. But the total voter registration was 1,229,239, so the turnout was only 36.5%.
The Primary Election turnout in 2016 was 40%. Just 27% of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2012 Primary, while 43% voted in 2008. That averages out to a 37% turnout for the last four Primaries in presidential election years in West Virginia.
So, what will happen this year? It is hard to say.
I have heard some unofficial early voting numbers that lag way behind 2022, an off-year election. Early voting is off to a sluggish start in the state’s largest county, Kanawha. Clerk Vera McCormick said last Friday they were averaging only 500 voters a day. “That’s all — it’s been very slow all over,” McCormick told MetroNews. “I thought it would be slower than usual, but not this slow.”
I’m not sure why. There is a lot on the line. Party nominations from the local level to the highest office in the land are at stake. Perhaps the fact that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the presumptive nominees is depressing turnout.
There are also critical races for judgeships, magistrate and school board, as well as local levies that impact government services and taxes and a few municipal elections. They should drive turnout.
Maybe politics and campaigns are increasingly a turnoff. Harsh negative ads have the potential to damage candidates, but they also alienate voters who grow weary of the attacks, especially as they become more brutal.
Voters are increasingly suspicious of politicians’ motives. A Pew Research Poll released last month found that 85% of those questioned in this country say most elected officials don’t care what “people like them” think. So, if someone feels that way, why would they take time to vote for them?
None of this bodes well for democracy, whether in West Virginia or the country. Of course, elections are important for the candidates, but there is much more at stake. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said, “The major achievement of a free society is in the ability to change the status quo without violence, to cast a current practice into limbo and adopt a new one by an election, to remake the economy or renovate an institution yet not destroy it, to refashion even the structure of government by votes rather than by force.”
And that is what it means to vote.
