excellent excerpt

Most of my book on poverty and addiction is about non-voters. That isn’t surprising since the poorest Americans are the least likely to vote. Yet I met plenty of working class and solidly middle class people who don’t vote.

One reason people don’t vote is because it is unnecessarily hard to do, and that should be changed. But it is far more than that. For many Americans, as they see it, not voting is the right choice, and they still wouldn’t vote if it was easier to do.

The attitude is best summed up by T, a forty-year old black man in Lumberton, North Carolina who explained why he didn’t vote in 2016,

“I am just so upset with the whole thing. Fed up. I voted for Obama. Seems like when he left office nothing changed for me. Nothing changed for this neighborhood. So I say, ‘We had a black president and I still working for eight dollars per hour and nothing has changed. Nothing. Ain’t nothing changed. Every single president. Obama. Bush. Clinton. Same thing.”

Or J, 62, in Battle Creek, Michigan,

“Most of the men I know didn’t vote. Nobody had the spirit this time. Trump or Hillary? Doesn’t make much difference. Things out here gonna stay the same. We had high hopes for Obama. But nothing changed. Blacks here didn’t end up being helped by him. I mean, he might have tried, but his hands were tied by both parties. Lots of us are just so frustrated. Nobody had the spirit.”

No change and still no hope, so why bother.

T and J at least took the time to respond. Most others, when asked about politics, simply roll their eyes, or laugh, or shake their head, or spit out something like, ‘Fuck them crooks.’

This isn’t a left or right thing, or a black or white thing, or an urban versus rural thing. It isn’t just an Obama thing, like in the two examples. I heard the same frustration and same disappointment directed at Bush and Romney from deep red regions, like trailer parks in West Virginia and truck stops in Kansas, just like I heard it directed at Obama and Clinton in deep blue regions like a housing project in downtown Cleveland and the wards of El Paso.

A deeper problem than partisan analysts see: