Letter: The 223,000 aren’t children refusing vegetables — they’ve read the menu

🎧 Why 223,000 Clark County Voters Sat Out the Primary

Anthony Teso provides a reply to Thomas Schenk’s letter to the editor about voter apathy

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

Thomas Schenk asks a pertinent question in his Aug. 10 letter, and it deserves a serious answer: why did roughly 223,000 of Clark County’s 360,000 eligible voters sit out the primary?

Anthony Teso

He runs through the usual suspects—the top-two primary, suspicion of mail-in ballots, and dislike of the candidates—and then settles on a metaphor. The electorate, he writes, behaves like a child at the dinner table refusing his vegetables, and perhaps we’ll have to bribe him to finish his plate.

I’d put it the other way around. The nonvoter is not a child who refuses to eat. He’s an adult who has read the menu.

The largest study of chronic nonvoters, the Knight Foundation’s survey of 12,000 people, found that the most common reason for staying home was disliking the candidates. Right behind it: they didn’t believe their vote would change anything. Nearly four in ten said they weren’t confident elections reflect the will of the people. And nonvoters are disproportionately poor — 44 percent have household incomes of $50,000 or less, against 26 percent of active voters.

That isn’t apathy. That’s a verdict. Working people have watched both parties for forty years and concluded, reasonably, that their wages, rent, or medical bills are decided elsewhere than the ballot.

That’s why the mail-in theory doesn’t hold up when you look at the numbers. Washington ranks among the highest-turnout states, and it does so with the very system Mr. Schenk is skeptical of. Delivery isn’t the bottleneck. The ballot arrives at 360,000 kitchen tables in this county. The question is what’s printed on it.

Mr. Schenk and I agree that Clark County families feel squeezed. We disagree about who is doing the squeezing.

Washington has one of the most regressive tax codes in the United States—by the standard national ranking, second-worst. About half the state budget rides on the sales tax, and a working household here pays roughly three times as large a share of its income in state and local taxes as a household at the very top does. That is the actual machinery by which Washington wallets get emptied, and it was built long before this legislature sat down.

The “millionaire’s tax” he objects to doesn’t take effect until January 2028, collects nothing until 2029, and applies only to income above one million dollars a year — about half a percent of state residents. Whatever else it is, it is not why anyone’s grocery bill went up this summer.

Nor did Olympia go on a spending spree. Governor Ferguson closed the $2.3 billion gap chiefly with about $800 million in cuts and a draw on the rainy day fund, and those cuts landed on childcare and public schools. My quarrel with the Democrats in Olympia isn’t that they refuse to cut. It’s that when the choice came down to cutting services for working families now or taxing substantial wealth now, they did the first immediately and scheduled the second for three years out.

As for Washington, D.C., the gross national debt stood at $39.83 trillion on August 7, up $2.88 trillion in twelve months—accumulated under unified Republican control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, at an average clip of about $92,000 per second. The party now floating “guardrails” has been driving this trend. Mr. Schenk writes that both parties have been irresponsible with the public’s money, and he’s right. He might carry that thought one paragraph further than he does.

So, to his closing question—how do we get a truly representative government if people opt out?

Neither lecturing nor bribing the 223,000 will work. They’ll turn out when something worth turning out for appears on the ballot: guaranteed health care, housing a warehouse worker can afford, wages that keep up with rent, and candidates who can actually be held to those promises after they’re sworn in. Turnout isn’t a character flaw in the electorate. It’s a reading on what the two parties are offering, and right now the needle is telling us something neither of them wants to hear.

Blaming the voter for the ballot is the oldest move in American politics. The vegetables aren’t the problem. It’s the kitchen.

Anthony P. Teso
Camas