It's Not in the Bag

Say what you will about Bill Maher but the guy is no dummy.

One of the things the comedian/political commentator references in “The Great Thing About Having Been Poor,” a recent piece he wrote about donating a million bucks to a pro-Obama super PAC, is the fact that progressives are overconfident and think the POTUS has this election in the bag.

He doesn’t.

Yes, the anointed GOP frontrunner, Robotron Romney, is about as appealing as a shiny Cadillac with a fluctuating gas gauge and an unreliable heater, and the other candidates are truly repulsive to most thinking Americans. But that’s the problem: thinking Americans don’t seem to decide our elections anymore. The U.S. Supreme Court appoints the president, or people who don’t know what the “zip” in “zip code” stands for (zone improvement plan) but think Rush Limbaugh is a sage and Ann “I Have an Adam’s Apple” Coulter is a babe determine the winner, or ballots get “lost” and hanging chads and paperless voting machines skew results, or the media dampen turnout by picking winners and losers in advance, thereby picking the winners and losers.

That’s what it all boils down to: voter turnout. And there’s been a trend of decreasing turnout since the 1960s. Some people don’t vote when the weather’s bad; others think our system is so corrupt that there’s nothing to be gained by pulling the lever. Attack ads and smear campaigns turn people off – thanks, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove – and young and unmarried people are less inclined to fulfill their civic duty. Although it’s not true that the amount of leisure time has declined in recent decades, people report that they don’t have time to vote. I’ve even talked to folks who think that since the Electoral College ultimately chooses the president, the popular vote is meaningless.

This is all b*llsh*t.

As I’ve written before, I’ve seen low turnout affect an election. The weekend before Michigan’s gubernatorial election in 1990, my boss, incumbent Jim Blanchard, was polling ahead of his challenger, State Senator John Engler, by double digits. Two days later, Engler won, defeating Blanchard by just 17,000 votes – less than one percentage point – and I was out of a job. Some people attributed Blanchard’s defeat to the fact that he dumped Martha Griffiths, his much-beloved lieutenant governor, from his ticket; others thought he should have done more to please then-Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, who didn’t exactly fire up voters in the D to head to the polls. But most observers agree that overconfidence and lower-than-expected turnout doomed his re-election bid.

I sure hope the same thing doesn’t happen this year. The stakes are high and the differences between the parties are significantly greater than Ralph Nader and the “they’re all crooks” crowd would have you believe. Just because Obama hasn’t done enough in the eyes of some progressives – and I encourage readers to click here for a list of his many accomplishments – or he comes across as infinitely more palatable than the clowns in the GOP don’t mean we can sit on our hands this November 6. I don’t want to go to sleep thinking the best candidate has locked things up and wake up to find that the bad guy snuck in the back door and the future is bleak. Been there and done that.

Spread the word.