Chapter 9: Participation, Campaigns, and Elections

Welcome to Last Minute Lecture.

This free chapter overview is designed to help students review and understand key concepts.

These summaries supplement not replaced the original textbook and may not be redistributed or resold.

For complete coverage, always consult the official text.

So I want you to imagine a 22 -year -old running for the state legislature.

Okay.

He's out there knocking on doors.

He's asking for votes, talking to his neighbors, and he's doing all of this wearing a full, wuddy Spider -Man suit.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

It sounds like a joke, right?

It really does.

But today we're actually looking at how a guy in a Marvel costume along with a

19 -year -old college freshman somehow managed to hack the most complex political machine in the world.

Yeah.

And that Spider -Man suit, it belongs to David Morales.

So in 2021, he became one of the Latino lawmakers in the entire country representing Rhode Island.

And he specifically campaigned in that costume because to him, Peter Parker represents the working class.

Like the character is usually broke.

He's struggling to pay rent.

Very relatable.

Exactly.

The average person can instantly relate to him.

It's honestly a brilliant strategy.

Morales is the son of Mexican immigrants raised by a single mom who sometimes had to work three jobs just to keep things afloat.

So his campaign wasn't about targeting the people who've been voting for 40 years.

He went out and mobilized the working class young people, voters of color, who were like

casting a ballot for the very first time.

Right.

And the result was wild.

He beat a six -year incumbent by more than 20 points.

Which is huge.

It is.

And you know, that actually brings us to the other side of the political spectrum, but with an identical kind of grassroots energy, Caleb Hanna.

Right.

The teenager.

Yeah.

In 2018, at just 19 years old, he was elected to the West Virginia State Legislature, and that made him the youngest black person ever elected to a state legislature.

His backstory is just wild to me.

Like he was originally inspired by Barack Obama back in the third grade.

Yeah, third grade.

He saw a charismatic black man become president and thought, you know, hey, I can do that.

But then his adoptive father, who was a coal miner, got laid off.

Right.

And Hanna blamed the environmental policies of that era for the job loss.

By the time he turned 18, he'd actually registered as a Republican.

Yeah.

And he built his platform on what he saw right in front of him.

He became a really fierce advocate for technical education, pushing this idea that, you know, you shouldn't need a four -year college degree to get a good paying job.

Right.

He also championed Second Amendment rights.

And just like Morales, he didn't rely on these massive advice.

He literally knocked on doors personally, making sure every single eligible high school classmate of his was registered to vote.

That's incredible.

And, you know, Morales and Hanna

represent the absolute pinnacle of what this deep dive is all about today.

Yeah.

Political participation.

Exactly.

They didn't just passively observe.

They grabbed the levers of power.

So for the rest of our time today, we're doing a ground up exploration of chapter nine from We the People.

The essentials of participation, campaigns, and elections.

Right.

We're going to unpack the mechanics of this massive American government machine from the hyper local laws that dictate who actually gets to vote all the way up to the billions of dollars funding modern campaigns.

Because to even get to the point where someone like Morales or Hanna gets elected, you need people to participate.

But, you know, the word participation is basically an umbrella term.

Right.

It means a lot of different things.

It covers a massive spectrum of activity.

And the historical and legal distinctions between those activities are super crucial.

Yeah.

I mean, there's voting, which we all know.

But then you have digital participation and physical actions like protests.

Let's look at how those physical actions break down because they aren't all treated the same by the system.

Not at all.

I mean, peaceful protests are fully protected by the First Amendment.

They're widely recognized as an essential mechanism for driving policy change.

Think of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who marched during the 1960s civil rights movement or the Black Lives Matter protests that force all those massive nationwide discussions on criminal justice reform.

Right.

Those actions operate within the bounds of democratic expression.

But then you have violent uprisings which sit outside those bounds.

Like when you look at the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021,

the goal wasn't just to express a grievance.

No, it was to actively stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College votes.

Right.

And when political scientists look at the surveys from January 6, they point to this really fascinating split in the data.

The textbook notes that the majority of Americans surveyed viewed the actors involved as extremists or anti -democratic.

Right.

But roughly 10 % viewed them as patriots who were, you know, vigorously supporting their country.

It really illustrates how entirely fractured our reality is when it comes to interpreting political action.

Yeah.

What one group sees as an insurrection, a small minority views as a defense of the nation, which I guess brings us back to the most universal agreed upon form of action, which is voting.

Right.

But casting a ballot is just one option on a much larger menu of participation.

Let's look at Figure 9 .1 in the text.

It charts out how Americans actually spend their political energy.

And it's essentially a measure of time and effort.

Voting is by far the most common.

In the 2020 general election, 67 % of eligible people voted.

But the moment you move to a non -presidential year, like the 2022 midterms, that number drops to 46%.

Wow.

And then compare that to digital participation.

The book says 36 % of people express support for a campaign on social media in 2020, which, you know, takes by five seconds.

Right.

It's very low effort.

But when you ask people to give up their actual money or their physical time, the participation just falls off a cliff.

Only 28 % contributed money in 2020, and that dropped to 18 % in 2022.

Yeah.

And attending a protest or rally, just 8 % in 2020 and 6 % in 2022.

It just shows that people are willing to engage, but only up to a certain threshold of inconvenience.

I always like to think of political participation like a massive restaurant menu.

Like voting is the main course.

Everyone knows it's there.

Most people order it and it keeps the restaurant in business.

But things like canvassing neighborhoods, organizing a local rally, donating part of your paycheck, those are the really spicy side dish.

Far fewer people order them because they require a much stronger stomach or, you know, a massive commitment of time and effort.

But those spicy side dishes are what actually influence who wins the election.

That is a perfect way to conceptualize it.

Candidates like Morales and Hanna didn't win because people simply ate the main course.

They won because a small, highly dedicated group of people ordered the spicy sides.

Exactly.

They volunteered.

They did the heavy lifting.

They disrupted the usual flow of the restaurant.

But if voting is the main course, we have to talk about who is actually allowed inside the restaurant because the guest list has changed drastically over time.

Oh, absolutely.

The history of suffrage, which is just the legal right to vote, is essentially a slow agonizing history of expansion.

In early America, voting was largely restricted to white male landowners.

If you didn't have property, you didn't have a voice.

It took until 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment,

for women to win the right to vote nationwide.

And that was only after more than half a century of relentless organizing.

Exactly.

And the mechanism behind the most recent massive expansion is super fascinating to me.

The 26th Amendment passed in 1971, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

Right.

And this wasn't just some random policy change.

It was a direct response to the Vietnam War.

Precisely.

The country was seeing massive disruptive student protests.

The logic was just undeniable.

If an 18 -year -old is old enough to be drafted by the government and sent to die in a jungle, they must be old enough to have a say in the government that's sending them there.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

The amendment was ratified specifically to channel that explosive protest energy into peaceful participation at the ballot box.

But the timeline of suffrage isn't just a straight line upward.

There were these brutal periods of regression, like you have the Jim Crow era, where southern states systematically suppressed the voting rights of black citizens, a lot of poor white citizens, too, through highly engineered state laws.

Yeah.

They used poll taxes, essentially forcing people to pay a fee to vote, which marginalized communities just couldn't afford.

Right.

They also implemented literacy tests that were incredibly subjective and literally designed to be impossible to pass.

It took the 1965 Voting Rights Act for the federal government to finally step in and override those discriminatory state mechanisms.

So fast forward to today.

The laws are on the books, but who is actually showing up to the table?

The demographics of the electorate are shifting under our feet.

Let's look at Latino voters.

Political analysts constantly refer to them as the sleeping giant of American politics.

The sleeping giant.

Yeah.

And the reason is pure math.

They account for more than half of all U .S.

population growth over the past decade.

Wow.

But the sleeping part of that nickname comes from their turnout rate, right?

Exactly.

In 2020, just over 54 % of eligible Latinos voted.

Compare that to about 71 % for white voters.

So the potential power is massive, but it just hasn't fully translated into ballot mocks dominance yet.

Then you have Asian American voters who are seeing explosive growth.

Projections in the text show their population will exceed 46 million by 2060.

Right.

And what's interesting about this block is how they unite.

They represent incredibly diverse cultural backgrounds,

but historically they mobilize most effectively around shared concerns like opposing ethnic discrimination or advocating for small business policies.

Yeah.

And we also see massive fault lines based on gender and religion.

The gender gap is a foundational concept in modern campaigns.

It refers to the distinctive pattern of voting behavior between men and women.

Okay.

How does that break down?

Well, women actively register and vote at higher rates than men.

In the 2018 midterms, for example, 55 % of women voted compared to 52 % of men.

And the split in preference is stark.

Women generally vote in higher numbers for democratic candidates while men lean significantly more toward Republicans.

And you really can't talk about American demographics without talking about the power of religion.

It acts as an incredibly potent organizing network.

Absolutely.

Black churches have historically been the backbone of civil rights mobilization and local political organization.

And on the conservative side,

white evangelical Protestants are a juggernaut voting block for the GOP.

Oh, massive.

Just look at the data.

In the 2024 presidential election,

a staggering 82 % of white evangelical Protestant voters supported Republican candidates.

82%.

Wow.

Yeah.

So those are the people, that's the demographic breakdown.

But honestly, it doesn't matter how fast a demographic is growing if they literally cannot get to the ballot box.

And that introduces the wild west of American elections, which is state laws.

Yeah.

If you look at the historical data for voter turnout over the last

century, like in figure 9 .2, it reads like a thriller novel.

It's a complete roller coaster.

It really is.

In the late 1800s, turnout was incredibly high.

People were highly engaged.

But then early in the 20th century, the floor just falls out.

Turnout drops sharply.

And the

requirements.

States started demanding that voters register well in advance of an election, often with complex residency rules.

The stated goal was to stop corruption and voter fraud orchestrated by political machines.

But the practical effect was that it actively discouraged millions of people, especially immigrants and the working poor from going to the polls.

It takes a massive shift in the country to pull those numbers back up.

During the new deal era

and 40s turnout climbs again because politicians and labor unions start aggressively organizing.

Right.

They were going into urban centers and mobilizing those immigrant populations to vote for the very first time.

But then the roller coaster dips again, starting around the 1960s.

Political parties began to lose their structural power.

And then the Watergate scandal hits in the early 1970s.

Yeah.

Watergate caused a catastrophic collapse in public trust in the federal government.

When people fundamentally don't trust the system, they just stop participating in it.

We did see a massive spike in turnout recently in 2020.

But zooming out, there's one unbreakable rule across all these historical eras.

Presidential elections always have significantly higher turnout than midterm elections, usually anywhere from five to 25 percentage points higher.

Yeah.

People tune in for the main event and often ignore the local races, which ironically have much more direct impact on their daily lives.

Okay.

Here's the question that always drives me crazy.

We're one United country.

So why does your specific zip code determine how easy it is to register and vote?

Because the data shows that in recent presidential elections, states like Minnesota and Wisconsin saw turnout around 76%.

But states like Mississippi and Oklahoma sat way down at 51 to 53%.

That's a massive discrepancy.

It is.

And the answer is federalism.

The Constitution does not create a single unified national election system.

It explicitly hands the power to control voter registration and the administration of elections over to the states.

And the states push that down even further.

Elections are largely funded and staffed by local county tax dollars.

So the system is hyper decentralized.

Totally fractured into thousands of pieces.

Your local county officials are the ones deciding where the polling places are located, how many voting machines to buy, how mail -in ballots are processed, how your signature is verified.

And because state legislatures make the overarching rules, they have the power to either drastically lower the barriers to voting by offering like same -day registration or automatic mail -in ballots, or raise them by requiring specific forms of government -issued photo ID.

Which is exactly why turnout is 76 % in Wisconsin and 51 % in Mississippi.

Precisely.

That decentralized patchwork of laws is the reason.

Okay.

Let's assume you navigate those local laws, you get registered, and you actually get a ballot.

What system are you participating in?

Because the path to office has a couple of massive hurdles, starting with the primary election.

Yeah.

Primaries are where the political party actually decides who will represent them in the general election.

And once again, state laws dictate how this works.

The mechanics are crucial here.

Some states use open primaries.

That means you can show up and vote for a candidate of any political party, regardless of your own registration.

So a registered independent, or even a Democrat, could decide to vote in the Republican primary.

Exactly.

The trade -off is that it encourages broader participation, but political parties hate it because it allows outsiders to potentially sabotage their choice of candidate.

Ah, I see.

That's why many states enforce closed primaries.

In a closed primary, only voters officially registered with that specific party can participate.

If you're an independent in a closed primary state, you're entirely locked out of the decision -making process for those candidates.

Got it.

And once the primaries are over, we hit the biggest general election of them all.

The race for the presidency.

And this requires understanding the electoral college.

Because the goal isn't actually getting the most individual votes across the country.

The goal is hitting the magic number of 270 electoral votes.

The math is fascinating.

There are 538 total electoral votes, which perfectly mirrors the DC.

And with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, every single state uses a winner -take -all system.

If a candidate wins a state by one million votes, or by one single vote, they get 100 % of that state's electoral votes.

This is where I have to push back on the math of the system, because it creates a wild imbalance.

Okay, let's hear it.

If you look at the population data, one single electoral vote in California represents roughly 731 ,000 people.

But one electoral vote in Wyoming represents only 192 ,000 people.

Doesn't that mechanically mean a vote cast in California is worth roughly a quarter of a vote cast in Wyoming?

Your math is spot on, and it highlights a fundamental feature of the system.

Because every state automatically gets two senate seats regardless of its population size, the electoral college is inherently structured to over -represent small population states and disadvantage large population states.

Which means a candidate could completely lose the national popular vote, but if they win the right combination of small and medium states, they become president.

Exactly, and it's happened four times in U .S.

history.

The most prominent modern example from the text is 2016, where Donald Trump secured enough electoral votes to win the presidency, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by almost 3 million individual votes.

Wow.

And navigating those primary rules, capturing the exact right combination of states for the electoral college,

it requires a massive coordinated effort.

And that effort requires money.

A staggering, almost incomprehensible amount of money.

Well, welcome to campaign finance, which is arguably the most convoluted mechanism in American politics.

If you look at Table 9 .1 in the chapter, it's just this tangled web of individual limits colliding with massive legal loopholes.

Let's break this down mechanically.

I like to think of an election campaign like a massive community garden that you're trying to water so your candidate can grow.

The law says that you, as an individual citizen, can only use a tiny little garden hose.

That's your direct contribution.

Right, and there's a hard cap on the water pressure.

For individuals, you are legally limited to giving exactly $3 ,300 per candidate per election.

That cap was put in place to prevent outright corruption.

But the Supreme Court essentially ruled that while you're stuck with your tiny garden hose, your incredibly wealthy neighbors can bring massive industrial fire hoses to water that exact same garden.

They just aren't allowed to coordinate with you or talk to the candidate while they do it.

That is the perfect analogy for super PACs.

The shift happened in 2010 with two landmark rulings.

The SpeechNow .org case and the Citizens United case.

Right.

The court's logic was that corporations, unions, and wealthy interest groups have a right to political speech.

So they're allowed to form these super PACs and spend unlimited sums of money, tens of millions of dollars.

The only catch is the uncoordinated part.

They have to operate independently, running their own ads and building their own field operations.

And then you have 527 committees, which are slightly different fire hoses.

They are.

527s can also raise unlimited funds, but they're established specifically for political advocacy and issue campaigns, and they're required to report their funding sources directly to the IRS.

What happens if the candidate themselves is a billionaire?

Do they have to use the tiny garden hose on their own garden?

The rules completely change for the candidates themselves.

Thanks to a 1976 Supreme Court decision called Buckley v Valeo, a candidate can spend an unlimited amount of their own personal wealth on their campaign.

Wow.

Unlimited.

Yep.

The court made a philosophical calculation.

They equated spending money to free speech.

They ruled that restricting a candidate's right to spend their own money is a violation of their right to speak on their own behalf.

So we have all this money flooding the zone.

How do candidates actually deploy those unlimited funds to win your vote?

It usually splits into two vastly different strategies.

On one side, you have grassroots campaigns.

These are highly labor intensive.

Think local elections, mayoral races, or state legislature seats.

It's all about face -to -face micro targeting, knocking on specific doors, handing out leaflets, having a conversation on a porch.

It's David Morales in his Spider -Man suit talking to his neighbors.

Exactly.

But on the other end of the spectrum, you have mass media campaigns.

These are statewide races for Senate and obviously the presidency.

They're incredibly money intensive and driven by television ads, digital tracking, and massive polling operations.

And because of the winner -take -all nature of the electoral college, presidential campaigns are forced into a very strict geographic strategy.

The battleground state strategy.

They basically ignore most of the map.

They have to.

They focus almost entirely on a handful of swing states where the population is divided perfectly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

If you look at the tracking data from the 2024 election cycle,

candidates practically ghosted the safe states.

If you lived in a deep blue state like New York or California, or a deep red state like West Virginia, you rarely saw a candidate visit.

But they absolutely smothered the battleground states.

The book notes there were 62 presidential campaign events in Pennsylvania and 45 in Michigan alone.

It creates this intense pressure cooker in just five or six states.

And when you combine that pressure, the billions of dollars spent by super PACs and the winner -take -all math,

it creates a relentlessly high stakes environment.

Oh, totally.

Which leads us to a deeply concerning psychological and political trend highlighted in the text.

Rejectionism.

Yeah.

Rejectionism is defined as the rising trend where partisans fundamentally refuse to accept the legitimacy of a defeat at the polls.

When the system produces a result that one side doesn't like, they don't just complain about the policy.

They reject the outcome itself as fraudulent.

And this isn't isolated to one moment.

We see this manifesting across the political spectrum in different ways.

We do.

Like following the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, backed by a significant number of Clinton supporters, pushed heavily for recounts and narrowly decided battleground states.

And when those recounts failed to change the results, polling showed that a majority of Democrats surveyed believed unsubstantiated claims that Trump campaign had actively conspired with Russians to steal the election.

And we saw a massive escalation of this following the 2020 election.

Donald Trump refused to concede defeat, pushing unsubstantiated claims of widespread voting fraud and rigged machines.

Right.

This effort culminated in the violent January 6th Capitol riot and widespread Stop the Steal rallies.

The lingering effect of that rejectionism is profound.

A 2022 survey showed that 34 % of Republicans believe Joe Biden was definitely not the rightful winner of the election.

The underlying psychology here is fascinating to me.

Research shows that on the losing side of an election, naturally tend to believe in fraud at much higher rates than the winning side.

It basically functions as a psychological defense mechanism.

Right.

Yeah.

It's easier to believe the game was rigged than to accept that your side simply lost.

It's a natural human reaction, but on a macro level, it's deeply damaging to the foundation of democracy.

When millions of people lose faith in the basic mechanics of how votes are counted, the entire system begins to wobble.

Modernizing election rules to ensure both access and security and rebuilding public trust in the administration of those rules is arguably the most urgent priority for the country.

Which brings us full circle.

We started today looking at David Morales and Caleb Hanna.

Yeah.

Two very young, highly motivated people who looked at this massive, complicated,

often frustrating machine and they decided not to reject it.

They decided to participate in it directly at the grassroots level.

They navigated the hyper local state laws, they figured out the primary systems, and they want to see it at the table.

When you look at their success in the context of everything we've discussed today, it raises an incredibly important question about the future of American government.

It really does.

And I want to leave you with a final thought to mull over.

Considering the massive barriers to entry we unpack today, the labyrinth of state by state voting laws, the mathematical hurdles of the electoral college, and the billions of dollars blasting out of the super -pague fire hoses,

how will young grassroots politicians like Morales and Hanna navigate those forces as they rise to national power?

Right.

Will they inevitably be absorbed by the massive, expensive campaign machine in order to survive?

Exactly.

Or will they be the ones to finally dismantle it and change the rules of the game entirely?

That is the defining challenge for the next generation stepping into the political arena.

Well, from all of us on the Last Minute Lecture team, thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive into the foundations of American government.

Keep asking the big questions.