There was an election today for the next mayor of the 8th largest city in the US, but there is only one story about it on the front page of DailyKos. And it's a diary under the "recent" list (not even the "recommended" list). It has only 4 recommendations (one of them mine).
There are still a number of outstanding precincts, but from the early results, it looks like San Diego's office of the mayor is going to flip back to the Republicans shortly.
We talk about the Dem voter turnout issue here, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about how to solve it.
The Democratic candidate here (Alvarez) was working a strong base strategy, and that's the only reason this one will end up being a close loss.
My small talk today was asking people if they had voted yet, and later, whether they had voted.
The responses were: one picture of their "I voted" sticker, one person unsure of whether they had mailed in their absentee ballot, one person who had noticed the voting poll signs and didn't know what was up for vote, and about 30 people that had no idea at all that there was an election today.
Of those people, if they had voted, roughly 99% would be Democratic votes.
The reason they did not vote (or simply did not know there was a vote), unanimously, was that they think their vote has no effect: politics is too far gone and corrupt to ever be influenced by their vote. Even if "their" candidate won, they don't believe any meaningful good will come of it.
I don't disagree, but what matters to the rest of the potential voting public is simply jobs and income. For example, no one else cares about the NSA. It has no traction outside of the web, and it was a wasted day. Figuring out how to increase turnout is vastly more important than any protest or petition.
I don't know how to fix this, but real change comes at the voting booth, and we need to set the details aside and figure out how to get more people there, for every election.