With Election Day approaching on November 4th, Americans are faced with a perennial question: to vote or not to vote? In the last midterm election, in 2010, only 47 percent of the eligible population voted. Voting patterns typically break down along clear demographic lines: Non-voters tend to be low-income, young and people of color, while those who vote tend to older, whiter and richer than the population at large. Over the last three elections, voter turnout has been consistently 30 points higher among the highest income bracket (those earning more than $150,000 a year) than those in the lowest (those earning less than $10,000). Recent research on the top one percent of the wealth distribution – millionaires – suggests that members of this group turn out to vote at the staggering rate of 99 percent.
For a long time, political scientists believed that this voting gap was immaterial, and that voters were effectively a "carbon copy" of the non-voting population. They argued that this meant that non-voters were still adequately represented in elections. For a long time, this was likely true – but since the late 1980s the class bias in the voting electorate has increased dramatically. At the same, public opinions on economic redistribution, government and regulation have polarized, with the rich rejecting the New Deal consensus in favor of laissez-faire lunacy. This means that our current election system is not representing what Americans really think.
