It’s ironic that in 2024 the very fate of our republic rests entirely in the hands of the nation’s 85 million low wage potential voters, roughly a third of the American electorate that society and the corporate news media regularly ignore. It’s the common Beltway wisdom that these folks at the base of the pyramid are marginal to the political conversation as compared to the vaunted middle class upon which both major parties have for so long fixated on.
It’s the product of a perverse feedback loop that was flagged by a Columbia University study undertaken of the 2106 electorate with the support of the Poor People’s Campaign, which studied the low-wage voter cohort and found a majority of them did not vote and when they were surveyed they explained they didn’t turn out because they didn’t hear candidates discuss issues that had any relevancy to their lives.
