Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP
Now that Joe Biden is the apparent Democratic nominee, turning out young, female, and unmarried voters is crucial.
I’ve knocked on the doors the Democrats did not reach in 2016 and desperately need in November if they are to dethrone President Trump.
One door I did knock on in 2016 belonged to a woman I will call Nia.
It was election night. I was canvassing a working-class African American neighborhood in Pittsburgh to get out the vote, using the rolls of registered Democrats. Nia had just gotten home from a long day at work and was settling in to make dinner for her three not yet school-aged children when I knocked.
I asked her if she had voted. She said no. I asked if she planned to vote. She said, “I know that it’s really important and I want to. But what can I do with these kids? I’m a single parent and I just sent the babysitter home. Am I allowed to bring them to the polls with me?”
“Oh yes!” I waxed enthusiastically. “They will see Mommy vote and get a great lesson in citizenship. Why, my parents brought me to the polls when I was small, and …”
Nia interrupted me. “Hmm, how long is the line?”
My heart sank. I had just passed the polling place and spoken to long lines of African American voters stoically braving the November chill.
“Three hours,” I admitted. I could see resignation and guilt in Nia’s slumping body and sad eyes. There was no way she could stand for three hours with three cold and hungry children.
In my five days of canvassing Pittsburgh neighborhoods, I did not meet any apathetic voters, save for a handful who happened to be intoxicated when I knocked on their door. However, I did meet many citizens like Nia who were frustrated away from voting.
Voting’s incompatibility with daily life was as effective as far more blatant tactics of voter suppression.
Pennsylvania was one of the states that did not give workers time off to vote. Even if Nia had been given two hours off, as is the case in many states, she would have had to leave work two hours early and she would have needed the foresight to anticipate the three-hour line in order to pay the babysitter to stay an extra hour.
She knew the election was important, but this kind of voting’s incompatibility with daily life was as effective as far more blatant tactics of voter suppression.
Trump’s victory also hinted strongly that the Democrats failed to offer enough reason for Nia to hurdle those barriers. The obvious question is whether the party will produce a nominee and a platform to get women like Nia to lace up their voting shoes.
In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama stirred passions in many corners as the first African American presidential nominee. His biography may also have spoken to unmarried women, as he was raised by a single mother. Obama won 70 percent of unmarried women and 74 percent of single mothers in his first victory over John McCain, and then 67 percent of unmarried women and 75 percent of single mothers in his re-election over Mitt Romney.
But in Hillary Clinton’s tragic loss to Donald Trump in 2016, she suffered a significant erosion of support among unmarried women. She won only 63 percent of their votes, seven percentage points under Obama’s 2008 performance and similar to John Kerry’s 62 percent in his 2004 loss to George W. Bush.
Trump meanwhile, despite his misogyny and the possibility of Clinton becoming the nation’s first female president, slightly increased the GOP’s share of unmarried women. His 32 percent share bested McCain’s 29 percent and Romney’s 31 percent.
Just as troubling were the unmarried women who did not vote in 2016. Fully 58.4 million of them were eligible to vote, 26 percent of the nation’s electorate (rising from 19 percent in 2002) and edging past the 58.1 million eligible married women.
But a third of unmarried women are still not registered to vote, compared to a quarter of married women who are not registered. Similarly, 10.5 percent of unmarried women who were registered to vote did not in 2016, compared to 6.8 percent of registered married women who did not vote, according to the Voter Participation Center.
All in all, while 70 percent of voting-eligible married female voters, who tend to be more conservative, voted in 2016 (a major contributing factor in Trump getting 52 percent of the white women’s vote), only 57 percent of voting-eligible unmarried women went to the polls. Both Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Trump won by a combined 55,000 votes out of nearly 11 million cast, were states where just 57 percent of voting-eligible unmarried women voted.
Part of Trump’s narrow margin surely resulted from Republican voter-suppression strategies that exploit the life challenges of the less privileged, which includes most single women.
One such example was a super-strict voter ID law in Pennsylvania that passed in 2012. It was struck down by the courts before the 2016 election. But I found in my canvassing that the still-legal requirement for first-time voters at any particular polling place to show an ID was still a major impediment for several key constituencies. One was low-income people, who move frequently because of unstable housing and might not have an up-to-date ID. Another was college students who changed their registrations to vote in Pennsylvania, but arrived at their polling place only to find that they were not yet listed on the local rolls.
At one polling place, I witnessed a scene where a Republican poll watcher challenged a young white woman named Alice for her ID. The watcher obviously gambled that Alice was a first-time—and perhaps unmarried—voter who might not possess one. Alice indeed had voted before at this location. She fortunately knew her rights and forcefully told the watcher that she did not need to show one.
But even though she was able to vote, the line stopped until Alice could go ahead and vote. That still contributed to suppression. A 2019 UCLA study found that voters in predominantly African American neighborhoods waited 29 percent longer than voters in predominantly white precincts and were 74 percent more likely than white voters to wait more than a half hour in line. A Scientific American story on the study said voter ID was a “particular culprit [responsible] for long lines … Like cars on a highway, even a single stopped voter can slow down the whole line. Areas with minority voters—who are less likely to have an ID—tend to be most affected by these laws.”
Thus, any successful Democratic Party strategy for November must factor in those life challenges. A Pew survey of nonvoters in the 2014 midterms found that 35 percent of nonvoters cited work or school conflicts as the reason they didn’t vote. Single mothers have both work and school conflicts in spades.
Unmarried women constitute a major part of the massive voting bloc dubbed the “Rising American Electorate” by the Voter Participation Center and Lake Research Partners. Young adults, people of color, and unmarried women together are projected to be 64 percent of November’s voting-eligible population. The 2018 midterm elections, which returned control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats, provided ample evidence of the desire of unmarried women to be heard at the polls, which contributed to record turnout for a midterm.
Part of Trump’s narrow margin surely resulted from Republican voter-suppression strategies that exploit the life challenges of the less privileged.
Democrats need to give this bloc their undivided attention in the run-up to November’s balloting. Many in the party establishment, however, are displaying angst about whether the Democrats are appealing sufficiently to the “center,” often a euphemism for white middle-class and working-class voters. Now that the apparent Democratic nominee is looking to be former Vice President Joe Biden, turning out young, female, and unmarried voters—particularly those of color—should be a crucial concern.
As pundits talk during the primaries about black voters in general and white women in states like Michigan vaulting Biden past Bernie Sanders, who failed to get out his youth vote, I’ve heard nothing in the election-night banter about a major and distinct group of black women. It is the 34 percent of black women who have never married by age 40 to 44, five times the never-married rate of white women in the same age range.
The Democrats are making a fatal mistake if they think comfort with Biden among longtime black voters appreciative of his eight years at the side of President Obama automatically translates to the enthusiasm needed in November to make voting a life-and-death priority. The unsubstantiated assumption I have personally heard over and over from mostly white Democratic activists is “We’re all going to vote for whoever the Democratic candidate is.”
Have any of those activists engaged with fellow Democrats like Nia? Since 2016, my litmus test for presidential electability has been “Will Nia vote for this candidate?” Sure, she always votes Democratic. But will she and the rest of the Rising American Electorate be enthused enough to overcome all the hurdles in their way and actually vote?
If I had to knock again on Nia’s door right now, I am not sure the result would be any different than it was in 2016. If voting to keep Trump out of office was not reason enough in 2016, it may well not be on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. I chose the name Nia for my emblematic voter of 2016 because it means “purpose” in Swahili and represents the fifth day of Kwanzaa.
The party needs a candidate and a convincing purpose that inspires Nia to hurdle the voter-suppression tactics designed to exploit her daily challenges. Obama, with his Rising American Electorate coalition that gave him two terms despite decisively losing the overall white vote, showed a pathway toward that end. It is not yet clear if the Democrats will choose to get back on that path.
