The Empty Seat: Why Voting Matters This Year

The midterms come Tuesday, November 3, and the single most consequential fact about them is not a candidate, a poll, or a map. It is that most eligible Americans will not vote. In 2022, the closest thing the country has seen to a high-turnout midterm in generations, 52.2 percent of the citizen voting-age population cast a ballot.¹ By the stricter measure that counts only the voting-eligible population, turnout was 46 percent.² Either way, the majority stayed home. In 2014 the number was worse: 41.9 percent by the census count, and just 36.4 percent of eligible voters by the elections-project measure, the lowest since 1942, a year when a large share of the country’s eligible voters were overseas fighting a world war.¹³ The largest bloc in American politics is not a party and not a movement. It is the empty seat.

I have spent this season writing about what is on the ballot, and the honest answer is that it is close to everything. Both chambers of Congress are genuinely in play for the first time in a long while, with the Senate majority running through a handful of true toss-ups and the House turning on a handful of seats.⁴ In Missouri, five statewide questions decide whether the people keep the power to answer their own questions the next time they are asked.⁵ The state legislative races this year will staff the chambers that draw the districts for the decade to come. And still the empty seat outnumbers all of it.

The margin

The first objection to voting is the familiar one, and the census has measured it. Among registered nonvoters in 2022, the second most common reason for staying home, after being too busy with work or school, was this: “Not interested, felt my vote wouldn’t make a difference,” given by 17.6 percent.¹ That answer deserves respect, and then it deserves an argument.

Every election is decided at the margin, and the margin is small. The 2000 presidential election was decided by 537 certified votes in Florida, out of nearly six million cast, a margin the state supreme court itself recorded before the recount it ordered was stopped.⁶ The closest congressional race in the country in 2022, Colorado’s third district, was decided by 546 votes after a mandatory recount that moved the total by four votes in all.⁷ This year’s map runs through places where the polls have been within a point or two for months, and the forecasters who rate these races keep moving them closer, not further apart.⁴ “Your vote does not matter” is a claim about an average. No election is an average. Each one is decided by the people who show up in the specific places where the count is close, and this year those places are everywhere.

The quiet majority

Who stays home shapes what the government looks like, because the government looks like its voters. The voters in 2022 were older, whiter, and more educated than the nonvoters; adults under fifty made up 36 percent of voters and 64 percent of nonvoters.² That gap is not a law of nature. It is a choice, made one Tuesday at a time, and it is why so much policy answers the people who reliably arrive.

One finding from the same study ought to end the lazy assumption that nonvoters belong to one side of the argument. Among citizens who voted in none of the three elections from 2018 through 2022, Republicans and Republican leaners outnumbered Democrats and Democratic leaners 46 to 41 percent.² Both coalitions keep an army on the bench. Elections in a country this evenly divided are decided not by persuasion but by which bench gets up.

What this year decides

The stakes this year have been laid out here at length, and the short form is that the verdict will be close and the places that decide it are the places where the campaigns are already happening.⁴ The longer form is what the No Kings coalition said when it turned its movement from the streets to the ballot box last month. Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin, announcing the October 17 national day of action:

“We’ve sent that message loud and clear – but we’re not just sending a message with this next No Kings. We’re taking back power for the people using our constitutional right to organize and our constitutional right to vote.”⁸

And the American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten, put the historical frame on it:

“250 years ago, America fought a Revolution to reject being governed by Kings. Today, to ensure No Kings in America, everyone who is eligible to vote must have access to vote and must get out to vote.”⁸

That is the argument in one paragraph, and it is not a partisan one. The ballot is the one instrument in the republic that every eligible citizen holds at equal weight, regardless of wealth, fame, or opinion. Every seat left empty is a vote cast by default for whoever the other side brought.

The act

Voting is not an opinion; it is an act, and acts have logistics. Three of them cover nearly every case.

Check your registration now, not in November. Registration rolls do not update themselves, and the last month before an election is exactly when problems surface. The federal government’s Vote.gov answers where and how to check in any state, and every secretary of state offers the same answer directly.

Make a plan and vote early if your state allows it. Most states now offer some form of early voting or mail voting, and voting early converts the risk of a bad Tuesday into a completed task. It also shortens the window in which anything can come between a voter and the count.

Bring someone. Turnout is interpersonal before it is statistical. The single most effective get-out-the-vote message in American politics is a specific person asking a specific person, and the campaigns know it because the research has said so for decades. A neighbor, a coworker, a grown child, a friend who has decided not to bother. The conversation is not a lecture; it is a ride.

The empty seat does not fill itself. The ballot does. On November 3, the amphitheater will be full or it will not, and the difference is not the weather, not the candidates, not the news cycle. It is whether the people who have spent the last four years saying the country is worth saving decide that this year, they are the ones who show up to save it. The republic does not ask for unanimity. It asks for a majority of the people who can be bothered, and the rest of what happens follows from the answer.

Think clearly. Live intentionally. Love deeply.

Notes

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