Wild idea, but I just thought I'd ask. Because I noticed this:
Final statistics are not in for 2012, but preliminary figures have it that of 198 million registered voters, 126 million turned out. So that's 64%. Of which 53% went for Obama and 47% for the cypher.
Of 100 people registered then:
36 didn't vote
34 voted D
30 voted R
If you wanted to win elections handily, would you, being pragmatic, seek to turnout those 36 for your side? Or try to keep/switch 3 or 4 conventional wisdom "swing voters?"
For that matter, where would you find the real swing voters?
And having found them, would you expect that promoting, very very strongly and fiercely, programs and ideas favoring the 99% would get, say 3 or 4 or more of the non-voters to turnout?
That's the registered voters.
Of 240 million eligible voters, registered or not, 57.5% (est) turned out. Let's call it 58%.
Of 100 eligible:
42 did not vote
31 voted D
27 voted R
Same questions apply.
A clue is in this piece mentioned by Meteor Blades' Night Owl front page a while ago:
What California Can Teach America About Stopping Extremist Obstruction
...Here in 2013, California is in a very different place - precisely because of the lessons learned from the era of Republican obstruction. Voters approved a tax increase to help schools. The state budget is headed toward surplus. Budgets are passed on time and without hostage tactics. State government is starting to become functional again.
That did not happen by accident. It happened because Democrats and progressives decided they had enough of Republican obstructionism and developed a plan to stop it for good. The plan included smarter legislative tactics, but the real keys were changes to the political process as well as an unprecedented organizing effort, all aimed at the same core goal: restoring political power to the people, not allowing it to remain concentrated in an extremist fringe.
The first step requires being honest about how politics now works. Another veteran of those California political wars, David Atkins, observed that expecting Republicans to act rationally is to misunderstand how the party operates:
The Republican electoral chips are stashed safely in gerrymandered hands, and any losses over fiscal cliffs or debt ceilings only hurt the President and the nation's perception of government. There's no downside for the GOP in bluffing every time in the hopes that the President will fold. Why not? When you're playing with house money, it makes sense to go all in on every hand.
This realization led California Democrats and progressives away from focusing on the specifics of a deal and toward the kind of process and political changes that would end the obstructionism for good. Once it was realized the problems were deeper, people started working on the lasting solutions...
...But it was also agreed that the electorate had to be expanded. Nobody knew what kind of electorate would show up in 2010, and Meg Whitman was already making it clear she would spent as much as it took to try and win the governor's race. Public confidence in the Legislature was at an all-time low, creating conditions that Republicans could potentially have exploited to win more seats, particularly if the 2010 electorate was more conservative than the historic 2008 electorate.
So work began on mobilizing hundreds of thousands of new and infrequent voters among the progressive base. Many of these voters were people of color, and many were low income. Their values were progressive, but since Democrats and progressive organizations had generally failed to reach out to them, they were not a regular part of the electorate. ...
[my emphasis -- jp]