Has any freshman member of Congress gotten more national publicity than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? I suppose that James Madison did, when as a member of the First Congress, in which every member was by definition a freshman, he proposed the Bill of Rights and led the opposition to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s financial legislation. And in the 230 years between 1789 and 2019 there may have been other examples as well; in 1811 the war-hawk freshman Henry Clay was elected speaker of the House, and in 1859, when the nation was (unknowingly) on the brink of civil war, freshman William Pennington was elected to the same post.
But back to AOC. One of the interesting things about her is that her support from the district she represents is so skimpy, even as her national fame only increases. Her campaign finance records show that, even though she raised more money than any other of the 87 House freshmen, only 10 of her constituents have contributed $200 or more to her reelection campaign so far. The $1,525.50 they pitched in was only 1.4% of her total fundraising haul.
She didn’t win all that many votes in her district either. The 14th District of New York, covering parts of Queens and the Bronx, had a 2010 population of 782,402. But only 29,778 people voted in its June 2018 Democratic primary (Republican turnout, as typical for New York City, was negligible). It’s true that a large number of 14th District residents are children and legal or illegal immigrants ineligible to vote. Its immigrant percentage is surely one of the highest in the nation. But it’s still also true that less than 10% of residents participated in the primary that elected AOC, who effortlessly beat a Republican in November by a 78% to 14% margin. The celebrity congresswoman, perhaps the most publicized House member after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was effectively elected by 16,898 voters in a nation of (the latest Census Bureau estimate) 329,448,990 people.
This is not an anomaly. In many central cities, sympathetic suburbs, and university towns, voter turnout in elections not held in the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in even-numbered years is pathetically small. Recently Democratic voters in Queens County, whose 2018 population the Census Bureau estimated at 2,278,906. Only 69,780 votes were cast in what turned out to be an exceedingly close primary. Borough President Melinda Katz, supported by the traditional Queens County machine Democrats, won 34,920 votes, while Tiffany Cabán, a left-winger supported by outfits linked to billionaire George Soros, won 34,860. Yes, that’s a 60-vote margin for the winner, who will be in charge of criminal prosecutions in a borough of more than 2 million people.
Soros-type outfits have been supporting other county prosecutor candidates, typically chosen in off-year elections and low-turnout primaries. You may have run across some of their names this past year. For example, there’s Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, criticized sharply by the local U.S. attorney for supporting the release of criminals, such as the man who fired multiple shots at police officers this last week. And there’s Chicago’s Kim Foxx, who in quite an irregular manner, and harshly criticized by the city’s police chief, dropped charges against the unrepentant hate-crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett. Foxx was effectively elected in March 2016, which was also Illinois’ presidential primary, and in which 1,107,395 votes were cast in a county with 5,180,493 people. Krasner was effectively chosen by a 38% plurality in a seven-candidate May 2017 Democratic primary. Turnout was 155,246 in a county of 1,580,221 people.
Elections for mayor, typically held in odd-numbered years, can be even more consequential than elections for prosecutor. Disastrous performances by a mayor and prosecutor after a highly-publicized death of someone in police custody played a major role in making Baltimore today America’s No. 1 major city in homicides. Turnout in mayor elections, once robust, has sunk to historically low levels, as I noted in 2017. The turnout in Los Angeles’s nonpartisan March 2017 election was 250,188, lower than in the last seriously contested election in 2009 (274,233), in a city with a population approaching 4 million. These numbers are similar to the turnout in the initial 1937 election (245,419), when Los Angeles had one-third today’s population, and below the all-time turnout peak in 1969 (839,409 in the runoff).
New York turnout recently has also been lower than in the lifetime of almost every voter. The nearly identical turnout in the November general elections in 2017 (1,092,746) and 2013 (1,087,710), in a city of more than 8 million, are the lowest since 1929. Turnout relative to population was more robust in Chicago’s spring 2019 nonpartisan first round (554,766) and runoff (523,804). These numbers were far below the total turnout in 1955 (1,290,121) and even below the winning total for Richard J. Daley (708,222 — a number he kept on his limousine’s license plates until his death in 1976). Aside from the lightly contested races in 2015, 2007, and 2003, turnout in Chicago mayoral races has been above 2019 levels for more than 100 years, since 1915, when it spiked as women got the vote in Illinois.
The political Left likes to portray the victories of AOC, New York Mayor de Blasio, and prosecutors Foxx and Krasner as a surge of support for leftist policies. Perhaps, but a surge among a very small proportion of the electorate. We have seen high and increasing turnout in presidential elections in 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 and in most congressional elections in between, but at the same time we have seen dwindling turnout in the central cities’ municipal and county elections. “Why is voter participation so much lower today in large cities than it once was?” I wrote after the Los Angeles election in 2017. “Evidently, city politics and city government mean less to big city residents today than they once did. The 1969 Los Angeles mayor race, for example, came at a high tide of concern about riots, rising crime rates and civil rights. Feelings on both sides were strong. Los Angeles then was also a bipartisan municipality, with a large population of homeowners who regularly voted Republican” — and there were similar voting blocs in the central cities of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia half a century ago. There are not many Republican voters left in these cities today.
“Other factors,” I went on, “include the fact that many Los Angeles residents are immigrant non-citizens, legal and illegal, and ineligible to vote. But in addition, it appears that members of the gentrifying population, thick on the ground in many parts of the city, are simply not as engaged in the electoral process as those homeowners were 50 years ago.
“Back then, public sector unions were not a major force; today, they are, and one suspects that they are generating much of the turnout that exists. The public employee unions … are trying to determine who sits on the other side of the bargaining table — and to give those elected officials every incentive to grant their members generous pay and (ruinously for the long-term fiscal health of the city) pensions.”
Public employee unions such as the Service Employees International Union hire people at minimal wages to picket and protest in cities such as New York; I wonder if they work to get these same people to get out and vote.
“The low voter participation in big cities suggests not only that there is no organized opposition to this, but that it’s a matter of indifference to most large city residents. They’re happy to see the persistence of the ‘blue model,’ as Walter Russell Mead calls it, even though it’s increasingly unsustainable. That’s a dangerous sort of indifference, for which someone — a great many someones — are going to have to pay.” Central city gentrifiers lament the benighted Heartland residents whom they see as the advanced guard of fascism and white nationalism. But they seem content to leave the management of their home precincts to the public employee unions and Soros organizers, along with the few voters they can mobilize from the masses of the indifferent.
