There’s a particular fantasy about election turnout that is quite common amongst people who aren’t happy with a particular outcome. It goes something like this:
Well, actually, only 60% of voters showed up. As many people as voted for the winners didn’t bother voting at all. Those people mainly probably agreed with me. If they had showed up, the result would be different. My worldview wasn’t rejected, it was just that we didn’t get our vote out.
The American political strategist Karl Rove used to observe about his opponents – the Democrats – that when an election didn’t go their way, they would say two things consistently: “We didn’t get our vote out” and “we didn’t get our message out”. Wrong, Rove says: The problem was that you did get your message out, and people didn’t like it enough to come out and vote for it.
In recent days, the “poor turnout” refrain has once again reared its head in relation to the Irish General election. There’s just one problem: the figures don’t really support the idea.
First, there’s the raw totals: The number of voters who cast a ballot (valid, or spoiled) in the 2024 Irish General Election actually exceeded the number of voters who did the same thing in 2020. Total turnout, in raw numbers, was up by about 17,500 votes in totality.
The percentage of turnout was down – from about 62% in 2020 to 60% last week – mainly because the number of voters on the register increased. But the register in many countries, including Ireland, is not an especially useful guide. There are lots of dead people on it. I myself am on it at least twice, because of a change of address, meaning that the turnout rate for John McGuirk was technically only 50%, even though I cast the one ballot I am legally allowed to cast. The problem in Ireland is that it is very easy to be added to the register – over 180,000 voters were added between the 2020 and 24 elections – but quite hard to be taken off it. It’s not anybody’s actual job, for example, to remove the dead from the voting register. My own late and dearly beloved uncle, who died over a year ago, received a polling card this week. He did not use it, being, as he is, dead. Technically, if you’re only looking at the figures, then my deceased uncle counts as a Fine Gael voter who stayed at home.
Of course, there are plenty of people in Ireland who simply chose not to vote, or who did not vote out of circumstances. Somebody close to me – a relative centrist – simply did not vote because they weren’t convinced by any of the options. Others likely intended to vote but the day got away from them and they figured that one vote wouldn’t make a difference anyway. Individually, those people were all entirely correct – no election outcome was decided this time by a single vote.
What is true, of course, is that non-voting is a particular habit of the working class. Consider the two four-seat Dublin Constituencies of Dublin South Central, and Dublin Rathdown. The electorate – the total number of people entitled to vote – was 77,000 in South Central, and 80,000 in Rathdown. Yet the quota in those two constituencies (the number of votes needed to take a seat) was 7,400 in South Central and 9,700 in Rathdown. Far more people in Dublin Rathdown came out to vote.
Of those two constituencies, it is not hard to see which is the richer. Dublin South Central is arguably the most working class and deprived four-seater in the country. Dublin Rathdown has a fair claim to be the wealthiest constituency, along with Dun Laoghaire and Dublin Bay South. The middle classes simply come out to vote at a higher rate than their working-class countrymen.
“Getting the working class out to vote” has basically been the pipe dream of every revolutionary left wing movement in the west for decades now: It’s a pipe-dream that has largely allowed them to live political existences of utter futility, because it allows a political movement to indulge a fantasy. That fantasy is that “our ideas are really popular, we just need to get more people out to vote”.
But the truth is that decisions in a democracy are made by those who voluntarily show up. People who are motivated to vote. On Friday night, before polls closed, my colleague Ben Scallan interviewed 30 people in Terenure who had just voted. They had overwhelmingly voted against radical change, and they had overwhelmingly done so because they valued, in their own words, stability. They were motivated to vote in their own interests.
It follows then, logically, that the best way to win elections is to persuade those people motivated to vote in their own interests that your cause is the one that best addresses those interests. That is what the bigger parties and successful smaller ones do: They do not start, necessarily, from their own ideology. They start instead from the proposition that they seek to win and wield power, and ask themselves what voters want from them in return. It turns out that “things are mostly going well, but you need help with childcare costs” is a more appealing message than “the country is about to disappear, and we need to completely up-end everything”.
None of this is, or should, be surprising. It has been the outcome of almost every election in the western and English-speaking worlds for fifty years. Fantasising that things would be different if only more people voted is simply a shortcut to actually doing the work necessary to win power. As Karl Rove once said: If you want people to vote, you need to give them something they are eager to vote for.
Those who lost this election failed on that count. The good news is that in a democracy, there will be more elections in future.