In 2016 almost twice as many citizens did not vote at all as did vote for Hillary Clinton. In that sense the popular vote (or non-vote) was won by the disaffected by a margin of about 45 to 27. Ex-President tRump ran third and was installed in office by our electoral college.
We like to think of ourselves as a democracy.
Who are the disaffected? What do we know about the 45% of our citizenry that does not vote at all? Not much beyond some guesses.
Maybe 5% of the population was too drunk or crazy to lurch to the polls. Another 5% was too ill, too old or too cold.
The remaining 35% who did not vote probably believed (on one level or another) that our governance system has been so corrupted by grifters, corporations and billionaires that it cannot possibly represent ordinary people at all. Non-voters likely feel absolutely no connection to Washington. It's nothing to them.
If you have ever written or phoned your congressional representative and gotten back a canned letter from a computer, you probably understand why the disaffected outnumber the Democrats.
This has been going on for a long time. How do we get the disaffected non-voter interested in participating in an election? Is it by nominating a centrist? Is that the key move that the disaffected have been waiting for?
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