I was looking at the 2004 election poll. The corporate media talks a lot about blue state/red state, or vote by race, but they almost never talk about the most important measure of how one will vote, vote by income. Of course income is stated in a heterogeneous way in the poll, as if money earned by working for a wage was the same as rents, interest and profit. It is also done by household, further diluting it. Nonetheless, you can still see the pattern when you look at it. The breakdown was:
Obviously, most people are voting based on household income, which is reflective of their class interest.
Now comes the problem:
http://elections.gmu.edu/Voter_Turnout_2004.htmIncreasingly, more and more adults working in the US can't vote. For example, in the state with the most electoral votes, California, 20.42% of the population are not US citizens. It's over 10% in Texas, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, Florida, and Nevada. What this means is the Republicans don't even need to go down to the median level, they can target the wealthiest 45%, or 40% and so on, and win that way.
If you read through history, from the Roman republic to England to the fight for suffrage in this country for 18 year olds, and before that blacks, and before that women, and before that white men who rented their homes, you see that the elites are always trying to limit voting to just the elite. With these changes they have been successful.
I live in New York City and tried to get people to sign a ballot initiative recently. Everyone (except one) I approached who lived in the area was not a citizen and couldn't vote. I spent days trying to get one signature, and couldn't. I finally found the owner of a store who lived locally and who was a citizen. It just showed me how it works.
The voting system is a tautological system, within which those people will never be able to vote. The only way to do anything is to work outside the electoral system. Which is possible - in Spain in 1936, half the country was taken over without any political parties or help from the government. This is the only thing that would get these people the vote anyhow - if they started to think that they as workers should control their workplace and whatnot, and do this via unions or workers councils, you can be sure the people blocking them the vote would force a retreat on them by trying to back down when they are successful on the direct front, to go back to representative voting.
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