It is time for the two major parties to work harder to earn new votes. One-third of Americans have not registered to vote and have not given their allegiance to any political party. Worse, neither of the major parties seems to be making much effort to earn new votes from these people.
According to the Pew Research Center, the two major parties are evenly matched: 49% of registered voters were also registered Democratic or leaned Democratic, while 48% were registered Republicans or leaned Republican. Sounds good, right? Not so fast!
According to the Census Bureau, only 69% of eligible voting-age Americans had registered to vote in 2022. Thus, after some math, it is clear that one-third of Americans are not impressed enough by any party to make the effort to register.
We acknowledge that registration is harder for some people, depending upon the requirements of the state they live in, their opportunities to take time off from work, their access to proper identification, and so on.
Part of the problem is that it has become too expensive for the national parties to invest in every state and for the state-level party offices and candidates to spend in every precinct. Instead, they prioritize only those states or precincts that look competitive. Safe seats are not worth spending on. For example, in the 2022 mid-terms, the five most competitive states accounted for 10% of the states but 33% of total advertising spending (AdImpact). The party in opposition in many safe seat states or precincts often declined even to run a candidate.
We wonder if another part of the problem might be that it has become cheaper to spend advertising on a few hot-button, polarizing issues than it is to do the polling and door-to-door research needed to learn what voters care about and develop policies to solve their problems.
Some organizations argue that another problem is the incentives facing candidates and their parties. Many reforms are on the table. You may want to spend some time looking at these. We describe some of these in our “explainer” on elections. You can see still more on this Wikipedia page.
Another possibility is that the parties have lost their capacity to coordinate the policy platforms of the candidates that affiliate with them. Ian Shapiro and Frances McCall Rosenbluth argue that the transfer of political power to the grassroots has weakened the parties, thus making room for divisive, populist politics. This claim may not be the whole story: the party leaderships are very powerful within Congress and many state legislatures.
