TREVOR SUDAMA
IN HER column in the September 23 Newsday, Debbie Jacob referred to a study by author Drew Western on voting behaviour in the US. She stated, 'Westen determined that only about 20 per cent of eligible voters determine an election. These independent voters analyse the facts. The other 80 per cent are almost evenly divided and committed to the Democratic or Republican Party. Little or nothing that either candidate says or does will change their minds.'
The statement illustrates the general inflexibility of voting patterns and raises the question of the motivation behind this inflexibility.
My own assessment as a former academic student of politics and as a participant in elections in TT is that such general inflexibility is an emotive response to certain latent stimuli, whether based on race, ethnicity, religious or cultural affinity, class, ideology, region, or a combination of these elements. They are enduring and intergenerational.
These motivations for voting are universal and found in long-established or emerging democracies. It is a small minority, in many cases even less than 20 per cent, who are amenable to persuasion through a reasoned discussion of facts and experiences and who do actually vote. They decide electoral change.
In the US, they can be found in the six or seven swing states. In TT, they reside in the seven or eight marginal constituencies.
Some examples worldwide would illustrate the motivations for voting which persist over time.
In the US today, Afro-Americans generally vote for the Democratic Party in the belief that it would be more sympathetic to and supportive of their racial concerns. On the other hand, tens of millions of Americans of European descent who support the policies and agenda of the Republican Party headed by ex-president Donald Trump are basically motivated by the conviction that the party will preserve and promote the superior status of white Americans against the socio-economic encroachment and political threat of the growing numbers of non-white Americans in the country.
The immigration issue is basically a question of race.
In Europe, the growing support for extremist right-wing parties has been founded largely on their rabid anti-immigrant stance of restricting non-white people of African, Middle Eastern or Asian origins from entering their countries.
Culture, language and, to some extent, geography have over a century determined French Canadian perspectives and voting patterns as against those Canadians of other origins.
In the US, it was historically an unwritten code that a person of Catholic religious persuasion should not attain the presidency of the US, until John F Kennedy was voted into office in 1960. Members of the southern Pentecostal churches, among others, have been continuously swayed by their religious beliefs in exercising their franchise.
In the UK, class has, from time immemorial, been a constant determinant of voting behaviour. Only recently in the 2019 general election, it was reported that const
