Why Democrats (and Everyone) Should Care About People Who Don't Vote

by Brian T. Lynch

Both political parties in America, along with virtually all television pundits and political opinion polling companies focus entirely on 60% of likely voters. We all ignore 40% of potential voters who don't vote. Polling surveys commissioned by both the Democratic and Republican Parties are always predicated on some variation of likely voters. The results are then grise for the mill of television and newspaper commentators and political party prognosticators. And so it is settled wisdom that all of our elections boil down to 7% of likely voters who are also the swing voters among us. Rightly or not, these much fawned over swing voters are considered most independent voters with centrist political ideology. These swing voters have a disproportionate influence over electoral strategies and policy positioning. As a result, we never hear much about the 40% of all Americans who are disillusioned with politics.

The conventional wisdom is that these non-voters don't care about politics, but it is equally true that the body politic doesn't care about these non-voters. We have come to the point where non-voters are the largest block of eligible voters in America. But are they really unreachable? Or are they justifiably disengaged because they are neglected by both the Democratic and Republican Parties? What is the potential for re-engaging this huge block of the electorate, and which political party has the most to gain? Which of our current Presidential candidates have the best shot at reaching out to these non-voters? And who are they anyway?

Why Democrats should care more about non-voters than swing voters

·      Among likely voters, there are about 10 million swing voters or 7% of all likely voters according to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight

·      There were 91.7 million non-voters in the 2016 presidential election or 40% of all eligible voters. Non-voters are the largest group of eligible voters

·      54% of non-voters (49.5 million votes) are Democrats or left-leaning non-voters

·      Another 10% of non-voters (14.7 million votes) have no political leaning

·      52% of all non-voters (47.7 million votes) want more government services, not less

·      The 64.2 million non-voting Democrats, left-leaning or neutral eligible voters represent over 6.4 times the number of swing voters in the 2016 election

·      This compares with 65.9 million Democratic votes for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election

Who are the eligible voters that are not engaged in voting?

·      66   million non-voters (72%) are under age 50. They are mostly younger voters

·      59.6 million non-voters (65%) are dissatisfied with the way things are in the country

·      54.1 million non-voters (59%) are White (non-Latino) citizens

·      19.3 million non-voters (21%) are Latino citizens

·      11   million non-voters (12%) are Black citizens

·      55  million non-voters (60%) either graduated or dropped out of high school

·      54.1 million non-voters (59%) are single

·      46.8 million non-voters (51%) experienced unemployment in their household in the prior 12 months

     39.4 million non-voters (43%) have household incomes of $30,000 or less per year

      By far, the largest number of eligible non-voters are people who once made up the base of the Democratic Party. They are citizens for whom the rightward and upward shift of both political parties over the year has left them without a voice in government. It is not only the right thing to do to reconnect with these less-fortunate Americans, but it is also in the best interest of the Democratic Party and the Nation. These disillusioned, often angry citizens are most vulnerable to the nationalistic authoritarian appeals to which they are being targeted every day. 

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The Centrist Threat to Democracy and the Globe

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW 

An editorial (and request for reader support) in The Guardian caught my attention because it so well states what is at stake for the United States and the world in the 2020 election. Please allow me to share part of it here and follow-up with an editorial comment of my own.

In his editorial, Hamilton Nolan of the Guardian writes:

"Even in our pitifully broken semi-democracy, rich people shouldn’t be in charge. The math is against them. There are, by definition, comparatively few rich people, and many middle- and lower-class people. In a two-party system where one party represents the interests of the rich and the other party is meant to represent the interests of everyone else, logic says that the rich people party should lose most of the time, based on sheer numbers. The political power of plutocrats should be arbitraged out of existence as parties seek a larger base." So true! This expresses in other words what I have been trying to say."

Here is the article:

THEGUARDIAN.COM

Bernie Sanders' real obstacle is not Trump. It's the Democratic establishment | Hamilton Nolan

More from the above Editorial:

"For the past four years, it has been clear that Sanders and Trump each represent a direct response to the severe (and warranted) disillusionment of average Americans, who have seen the American dream of economic mobility die during their lifetimes.
Trump represents the dark path of racism, nationalism, and division; Bernie represents the other path, of socialism, multiculturalism, and solidarity... Any sane and moral political party should want to do everything possible to make Sanders’ vision become a reality. The alternative is not a fresh flowering of centrism. It is something much, much worse.
America is at a tipping point, finely balanced between truth and lies, hope and hate, civility and nastiness. Many vital aspects of American public life are in play – the Supreme Court, abortion rights, climate policy, wealth inequality, Big Tech and much more. The stakes could hardly be higher."

Everyone, please hear me out!

We must reject the urge for safe, centrist candidates who believe they can still reach across the aisle for bipartisan support for their half measures and incremental steps. This didn't work in 2016 and it isn't going to work now. The number of disillusioned citizens far outnumber the entire Democratic Party, let alone the elites and centrists within it. A centrist candidate may feel safe, but we are beyond normal politics. We are in a war against a well funded, wells organized global authoritarian movement threatening democracies everywhere.

Donald Trump has had three more years to harvest disaffected "likely-voters" and 45% of all eligible voters who stopped voting for either party years ago. He is coaxing these folks to join his dark and vile plutocracy.

If the Democratic party doesn't boldly reconnect with poor people and the working poor (our traditional base), the opportunity to beat back the dark forces of fascist-style authoritarianism will be lost for a generation. The consequences will be atrocious, if not actually bloody. And a generation lost is enough time for the very worst effects of global warming to be baked into the future of the planet for a millennium.

On September 19th Donald Trump Declared Himself our Dictator

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

On the morning of September 19, 2019, history will note, President Donald J. Trump officially declared himself to be this country’s first authoritarian dictator. On that day he announced to the world, in a court filing, that he was assuming unlimited criminal immunity to act within or outside the law. He also declared that anyone who works for him on his behalf is also above the law and cannot be investigated, charged or convicted of any crimes as long as he is in office. By logical extension, if no violation of the law can apply to him while in office, then no election can remove him from office and no Congress can remove him by impeachment or check his powers in any way.

This isn’t how the first draft of history read that day. Trump’s dramatic claims received relatively little notice. They came in a court filing and were so outrageous and incredible that no one took it seriously. The headlines on that Thursday read like some variation of this one from the New York Law Journal:

“Trump Sues Manhattan DA Vance in Federal Court in Wake of Tax Subpoenas” 

In the wake of the Mueller investigation, with its assortment of indictments, trials, and convictions of Trump associates, there were over a dozen less noticed criminal investigations spun off to be conducted in other states by other prosecutors. It was a court filing in one of these lesser-known investigations that the President announced his sweeping declarations.

On October 7, 2019, District Judge Victor Marrero, of the Southern District of New York, summed up the President’s claim in an introduction to his ruling rejecting Trump’s claim. Judge Marrero’s ruling reads in part:

“The President asserts an extraordinary claim in the dispute now before this Court. He contends that… under the United States Constitution, the person who serves as President, while in office, enjoys absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind. Consider the reach of the President's argument. [As] the Court reads it, presidential immunity would stretch to cover every phase of criminal proceedings, including investigations, grand jury proceedings and subpoenas, indictment, prosecution, arrest, trial conviction, and incarceration. That constitutional protection presumably would encompass any conduct, at any time, in any forum whether federal or state, and whether the President acted alone or in concert with other individuals. Hence, according to this categorical doctrine as presented in this proceeding, the constitutional dimensions of the presidential shield from judicial process are virtually limitless: Until the President leaves office… [this includes crimes committed in*] his official capacity, but also to ones arising from his private affairs, financial transactions, and all other conduct undertaken by him as an ordinary citizen both during and before his tenure in office."
 "Moreover, on this theory the President's special dispensation from the criminal law's purview and judicial inquiry would embrace not only the behavior and activities of the President himself, but also extend derivatively so as to potentially immunize the misconduct of any other person, business affiliate associate, or relative who may have collaborated with the President in committing purportedly unlawful acts, and whose offenses ordinarily would warrant criminal investigation and prosecution of all involved.”

The judge concluded his introduction with these words:

“Because this finds aspects of such a [Presidential] doctrine repugnant to the nation' s governmental structure and constitutional values, and for the reasons further stated below it ABSTAINS from adjudicating this dispute and DISMISSES the President' s suit.”

The Trump Administration immediately appealed.

President Trump’s immunity doctrine stemmed from a criminal investigation to see if Trump’s non-profit organization falsified business records.

In summary, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. is a District Attorney in New York. He empaneled a grand jury to probe whether the Trump Organization falsified business records related to money paid to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal prior to the 2016 Presidential Election to keep them quiet about his sexual relationships with them. These were payoffs funneled through Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Some of these payments were by checks made out to Cohen from the Trump Organization, a non-profit entity registered in New York. These payments were categorized as legal fees on the books of this non-profit.

Paying to keep damaging information from the public during an election is a violation of campaign finance laws. Using money donated to a non-profit organization for personal use is also a violation of the law, as is falsifying business records to cover up such misdeeds.

The grand jury investigating the business records of the Trump Organization requires documents, tax records and the cooperation of Mazars USA, the accounting firm hired by the Organization. Trump sent a letter to Mazars USA and forbade the company from releasing his tax records. The jury subpoenaed the company to release the last eight years of Donald Trump’s tax returns. That’s when Trump made his move on unlimited Executive power.

How this constitutional crisis resolves is critical to our republic. By elevating William Barr to Attorney General, Trump, and the Republicans have removed any chance that the Barr-lead Justice Department will ever challenge any illegality committed by the President or his administration. By ramming through two ultra-partisan Supreme Court Justices, and by seating so many highly partisan judges to the federal bench, Trump and the Republicans are betting that all legal challenges to both Congressional oversights, or judicial challenges to Trump’s limitless criminal immunity doctrine, will ultimately fail. The complicity of Congressional Republicans in installing this all-powerful authoritarian government should now be obvious. Articles of impeachment should still be aggressively pursued, but it is no longer a given that an impeachment conviction in the Senate would remove Trump from office. Under his unlimited criminal immunity doctrine, it isn’t even certain that he will honor Presidential election results, or even allow future elections.

Here is where I believe we stand. If the courts don’t uphold the rule of law, all hope for the republic is lost. If the courts do uphold the rule of law after House impeachment and Senate conviction, then it will be up to some combination of the President’s willing capitulation, law enforcement, the U.S. military or massive national citizen protests to assure that Donald Trump leaves office. If the Senate won’t convict Trump of impeachable offenses, it is up to the voters to set the stage for the same options mentioned above. If Donald Trump is reelected, however, it will probably be too late to save our Republic from dictatorial rule.

Hidden Forces Behind Fascist Movements Here and Abroad

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

Sweeden's war on global fascism is our war too. Some of you might dismiss me as a conspiracy nut when I write that Russians and our own right-wing media are attacking us every day. The article linked to here from the NY Times is illuminating on this subject and supports my observations. And yes... Russia really IS waging a vigorous global war on all Western nations. Donald Trump really IS enabling foreign attacks on U.S. citizens to further his own white nationalist goals.

The Russian goal is to destabilize Western democracies and turn them into fascist-crony capitalist states where super-billionaires like Putin, the richest man who ever lived, can make more money, control more people and destroy more lives for his personal pleasure. This isn't too far from President Trump's own desires.  It is perhaps why he holds Vladimir Putin in such high regard.

Destroying pluralism, establishing global white supremacy, and making the world safe for crony capitalism is also Steve Bannon's vision. He readily admits in his interviews that he wants to break us down so he can remake the world according to his liking. His ideas are aligned with the visions of many on the far right, including rogue billionaires such as Robert Mercer and the Kock brothers. And their visions are aligned with many of Senate and Congressional Republicans who want to control our country.

And so it is that the interests of the political far-right, Vladimir Putin's Russia, rogue international billionaires, and now wealthy totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia, have all converged. The separate interest groups may not be directly coordinating with each other, but they are aligned and working in tandem. The forces arrayed against us are both domestic and foreign, both civilian and military. The methods of attack are the used of wealth and power to take economic controls over national economies and public media domination to conduct military-grade psychological warfare augmented by high-tech, mind-altering media propaganda techniques. We are clearly under attack yet most of us refuse to admit it.

For many who have fallen victim to these attacks, to admit you have been attacked is to admit you have been gullible, vulnerable, and manipulated. It means admitting your ideas might not be entirely your own, that others may have been controlling how you feel about think. Who has the courage to admit to all that?

There are things we can do to take back and hold onto our heritage, our narrative, and our democracy, but first, we have to open our eyes to the global assault we are under. We have to look past partisan politics which is tossed like sand in our eyes so we don't see the big picture. We have to see ultra-partisan citizens as damaged victims in this global war and find ways to reach them. We have to unify and rally ourselves. We have to reject leaders who think we are still operating on the old political paradigms. But it must start by recognizing that we are at war. 

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Picture Credit: NY Times:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/world/europe/sweden-immigration-nationalism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

BORDER SECURITY THREAT ASSESSMENT: Do Facts Reveal a Border

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

The government is shut down as I write. If you happen to read this blog post after today, it will be the longest federal government shutdown in United States' history. The reason for it is a claim by the President that there is a national crisis at the border. The President says we aren't safe and the crisis can't be resolved without five-billion-dollars to build a section of wall. 

IS THERE A CRISIS AT THE BORDER? Or is our President having a temper tantrum as some have suggested?

Let us start to answer that with statistics that President Trump’s own administration presents about border security. 

Per data in Donald Trump's Executive Order 13789, the # of non-citizens federally convicted of terrorists in 15yrs 2mo time = 244 terrorists, (16 per yr.). That's 44% of the total terrorists. The other 295 (55%) are US citizens 1/2 of which (8.5/yr.) were foreign-born. https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1026436/download 

PLEASE NOTE: As of NOW, if you try to VERIFY the URL and link above you will get this message instead of the document:

Continuing with the report: 

In this same 182-month period, 1,716 US aliens, or 113 per year, were removed from the country for being a national security threat. In contrast, there are 1,300,000 domestic violence attacks per year or 11,504 attacks for every alien ejected for being a security risk.

The Executive Order also says there are 25 honor killings each year, but there are also over 1,000 domestic violence deaths of intimate partners per year in the US. Honor killings are 2.5% of that total.

AND THIS is directly from the Executive Order: In the fiscal year 2017, DHS had 2,554 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watchlist traveling to the United States. Of those encounters, 335 were attempting to enter by land, 2,170 by air, and 49 by sea.

That is just 13% of all terrorist watchlist persons traveling by land from either from Canada or the Mexico border.

Since 2010, the last 8 years, there have been 46 terrorist attacks in the US resulting in 106 dead and 527 injured (Boston bombing nearly half the injuries): 20 attacks by Islamic extremists, 16 by rightwing extremists, 5 by 4 by mental illness and 1 by a leftwing extremist. (The author from a list of terrorist attacks on Wikipedia)

Border crossers rape and murder at lower rates than the general population. Or to flip that around, they are more law-abiding than our citizens. Here is a summary of an actual scholarly report:

In the context of crime, victimization, and immigration in the United States, research shows that people are afraid of immigrants because they think immigrants are a threat to their safety and engage in many violent and property crimes. However, quantitative research has consistently shown that being foreign-born is negatively associated with crime overall and is not significantly associated with committing either violent or property crime. If an undocumented immigrant is arrested for a criminal offense, it tends to be for a misdemeanor.

Researchers suggest that undocumented immigrants may be less likely to engage in serious criminal offending behavior because they seek to earn money and not to draw attention to themselves. Additionally, immigrants who have access to social services are less likely to engage in crime than those who live in communities where such access is not available.

In regard to victimization, immigrants are more likely to be victims of crime. Foreign-born victims of crime may not report their victimization because of fears that they will experience negative consequences if they contact the police. Recently, concern about immigration and victimization has turned to refugees who are at risk of harm from traffickers, who warehouse them, threaten them, and physically abuse them with impunity. More research is needed on the relationship among immigration, offending, and victimization. The United States and other nations that focus on border security may be misplacing their efforts during global crises that result in forced migrations. Poverty and war, among other social conditions that would “encourage” a person to leave their homeland in search of a better life, should be addressed by governments when enforcing immigration laws.

http://oxfordre.com/.../97801.../acrefore-9780190264079-e-93

Here are a few data charts that are helpful in identifying whether or not there is a present crisis at the border:






OXFORDRE.COM

Immigration and Crime - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of…

Immigration and Crime - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology


And here is another study ABSTRACT: 

Research has shown little support for the enduring proposition that increases in immigration are associated with increases in crime. Although classical criminological and neoclassical economic theories would predict immigration to increase crime, most empirical research shows quite the opposite. We investigate the immigration-crime relationship among metropolitan areas over a 40-year period from 1970 to 2010. Our goal is to describe the ongoing and changing association between immigration and a broad range of violent and property crimes. Our results indicate that immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime throughout the time period.https://www.tandfonline.com/.../10.../15377938.2016.1261057

TANDFONLINE.COM

A 2018 study published in Criminology analyzed population-level crime rates from all 50 states from 1990 to 2014 and found that the relationship between immigration and crime is "generally negative." "Increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of violence," study author Michael Light writes.https://psmag.com/.../research-tells-us-that-immigration...

PSMAG.COM

A 2015 study found that, in the same period, the immigration population more than tripled in the United States; from 1990 to 2013, the violent crime rate decreased by 48 percent, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data. (ibid)

Here is a screenshot of a graph by the Pew Research Center from a FactCheck.org Website

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/illegal-immigration-statistics/

And here below are a few more charts from a U.S. Customs and Border Security Report that were also published by FactCheck.org :

Notice in the above bar graph dating all the way back to 1961 that the total number of border crossings the year 2000 and has significantly declined since.  The total number of border crossings in 2018 (last year) is 76% below the number in 2000.

While the total number of people crossing the U.S. border is down 76% from the year 2000, the number of family detentions is up. 

Notice that the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border peeked in 2014 and dropped the following year. The number rose again in Barack Obama's last year in office then dropped again since President Trump took office. Last year (2018) the rate of unaccompanied minors crossing the border was about 37% lower than in 2014. 

SUMMARY: From every scholarly study and government information source, the most objective rendering of facts do not support the claim that there is an immigration crisis at our border. And in fact, the data show such a low rate of crimes committed by immigrants that the more immigrants a community has, the lower the crime rate. 

As to why our President is claiming a border crisis and shutting down the government to get his wall build? Who besides him really knows why. What the facts show is that there is no border crisis and no need to disrupt the government and the lives of millions of people affected by the shutdown.