Some Hoosiers might be second-guessing decisions they made five months ago.
They may regret voting for the legislators who plan to repeal the common wage law in Indiana, where per-capita incomes already rank a lowly 39th among all 50 states; or those who have stripped authority from State Superintendent of Schools Glenda Ritz, the lone Democrat elected to statewide office; or those who pushed the divisive Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law, ignoring warnings from their traditional Republican supporters that it would damage the state’s reputation and economy.
Or, more likely, those self-questioning Hoosiers may regret not voting at all.
Most stayed home last Nov. 4. The small percentage that did go to the polls for that midterm election voted overwhelmingly to give one party, the Republicans, super majority dominance in both chambers of the Legislature — the Indiana House and Indiana Senate — to operate largely unchallenged alongside fellow Republican Gov. Mike Pence.
So, despite the protests and backlash over the wage law repeal, the minimization of the top schools official, and the RFRA debacle, in a nutshell, Indiana voted for this.
Most of the state’s voting population — people who carry out their civic duty — want this political structure, with one party in full control. The general population — which includes both voters and nonvoters — holds more moderate views than the chosen captains of Indiana government. The political reality of one-party rule, though, relegates the priorities of the opposition’s supporters and nonvoters to the bottom of the list.
Some may say, yes, they did vote for the super-majority candidates, but during their campaigns those politicians never mentioned an intention to, for example, repeal Indiana’s 80-year-old common wage law, which allows communities to determine workers’ wages for public construction projects. Those surprises have become routine during the past decade, as corporate-funded and special-interest-backed national political action groups craft “model bills” that their members (specifically state legislators) carry back to Indiana, North Dakota, Kansas or wherever. Thus, though people back home weren’t clamoring to have their post-recession paychecks further suppressed by a common-wage law repeal, it marches through the Legislature anyway, aided by the PAC’s pre-packaged ad campaign, customized to discredit the inevitable response from those negatively affected by the self-interest-based law.
The presence of a viable opposition party — a balanced government — helps filter such stuff. Indiana lacks those checks and balances. The numbers from Nov. 4 explain the situation.
The voting-eligible population (all Hoosiers over 18, except inmates and non-citizens) was 4,818,728 for the 2014 election. Only 1,388,965 of those Indiana residents voted, or 28.8 percent. It was the lowest turnout in America, according to the United States Elections Project. Barely more than a quarter of potential voters participated in determining the makeup of the 2015 Indiana General Assembly.
Among those who voted, 63 percent (760,554) chose Republicans in races for the Indiana House of Representatives, compared to 36 percent (432,109) who picked Democrats and 1.3 percent (15,885) who favored Libertarians or independents. In races for the Indiana Senate, 68 percent of voters (439,325) picked Republicans, 30 percent (196,272) Democrats and 1.3 percent (8,865) Libertarians.
By contrast, 3,429,763 eligible Hoosiers didn’t vote. The nonvoters of 2014, according to Pew Research Center polling, were “younger, more racially diverse, more financially strapped” Americans. A whopping 45 percent of them identify themselves as independent, compared to only 18 percent as Republicans and 29 percent as Democrats. Though they’re not participating in the election process, such Hoosiers’ needs and desires deserve consideration. Given human nature, though, lawmakers are more likely to tell unaligned nonvoters from afar what they need, rather than to ask.
Likewise, the power party sees little political benefit in encouraging nonvoters to become voters. They enact, or leave unchanged, policies that create additional steps or barriers to broader voting by sectors less likely to support them; in Indiana, those policies include the voter ID law, the one-month-before-the-election registration deadline (completely unnecessary with a voter ID law), the earliest-in-the-nation 6 p.m. poll closing time, and the requirement to provide an excuse for voting absentee by mail. In this 2015 session, Republicans rejected a worthwhile bill to pre-register 16-year-olds when they get their driver’s license, which would steer thousands annually into the civic engagement pipeline.
Protests might change some of these elected officials’ minds, but votes by more Hoosiers would be more effective.