{"id":7802,"date":"2020-02-23T13:28:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-23T19:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=7802"},"modified":"2020-02-22T13:30:50","modified_gmt":"2020-02-22T19:30:50","slug":"civics-half-of-americans-dont-vote-what-are-they-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=7802","title":{"rendered":"Civics: Half of Americans Don\u2019t Vote. What Are They Thinking?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/magazine\/2020\/02\/19\/knight-nonvoter-study-decoding-2020-election-wild-card-115796\">Colin Woodard<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cMy parents, they were coming out of that generation of the \u201960s and the civil rights movement and you voted,\u201d she says. \u201cNow people just don\u2019t get it. They look at it like they have other things to do, like grocery shopping or sending the kids off to school. But elections don\u2019t happen every day!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>Riggins-Furlow\u2019s sense of a fickle, distracted citizenry touches on one of the biggest mysteries of United States electoral politics: Why nearly half of the nation\u2019s eligible voters almost never exercise that fundamental right. The sheer size of the group\u2014approximately 92 million eligible voters\u2014makes it a potential wild card in the 2020 presidential election. That is if the political world understood what keeps them away from the polls, and, more importantly, what might lure them in the first place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>On Wednesday, the Knight Foundation released the results of \u201cThe 100 Million Project,\u201d the largest survey of chronic nonvoters in history, and the most robust attempt ever to answer some of the questions that have long bedeviled political scientists. More than 13,000 people were polled across the country, with special emphasis on 10 battleground states, followed by in-depth focus-group conversations with thousands of them. They were asked about their political preferences, media diets, social networks, income levels, general life satisfaction, and about their demographic characteristics and social connectivity, their reasons for not voting, and their assessments of electoral and political institutions. The result is the most comprehensive survey of the politically disengaged to date, with lessons political consultants, candidates and civic educators won\u2019t want to miss.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Notes and links on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.schoolinfosystem.org\/e\/2020\/\">2020 Madison School Board election.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Woodard: \u201cMy parents, they were coming out of that generation of the \u201960s and the civil rights movement and you voted,\u201d she says. \u201cNow people just don\u2019t get it. They look at it like they have other things to do, like grocery shopping or sending the kids off to school. But elections don\u2019t happen [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7803,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7802\/revisions\/7803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}