Disabled voters
Simple “disability awareness” isn’t enough for candidates who care about appealing to disabled voters. This is a sign of progress for the disability community, and a challenge for politicians.
There are always a dozen novel theories about how candidates for office can appeal to untapped wells of voter support. Some have more merit than others. Some electoral strategies are culturally or ideologically appealing, but amount to little more than wishful thinking. Others are potentially effective, but morally questionable. But one constituency worth pursuing for both moral and politically practical reasons is voters with disabilities.
The 2022 Midterms campaign season is already well underway. It’s a bit like a Christmas shopping season for politics. And much as some busineses try to learn more about serving customers with disabilities, politicians need to know more about disabled voters. In fact, politicians have a much greater obligation than retailers do. Businesses are merely selling products. Elected officials are supposed to represent all of their constituents. And they have the power to safeguard, improve, or undermine disabled people’s lives and place in society. Still, it can be hard for candidates in active races, whose immediate priority is simply to win the most votes, to see why they should give disabled voters more than a passing thought and a fleeting goodwill gesture.
There is a significant participation gap between disabled and non-disabled voters. For a variety of systemic and personal reasons, eligible disabled people consistently vote less often than non-disabled people. However, this gap has been narrowing. Rutgers University researchers Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse have been reporting on disability participation in every General Election and Midterms almost 15 years. According to their reports, the gap between disabled and non-disabled voting in 2008 was 7 percent. But by the 2020 election, the gap had shrunk to only 5.7 percent. The disability vote is growing, gradually but decisively. That’s just one reason why it is important that all candidates for office have at least some basic understanding of disabled voters — what they look like, what they want, and what courting their votes does and doesn’t mean.
For a start, here are 6 important things for candidates to understand and consider about voters with disabilities:
1. A lot of voters have disabilities.
Schur and Kruse report that 17.7 million people with disabilities voted in the 2020 General Election. That makes disabled people far from a tiny, third-rate special interest. The disability vote is comparable in size with many other political constituencies whose interests are in general more widely and deeply understood, and whose votes candidates have much more deliberately courted for decades. If and when the participation gap narrows further or disappears, the number of disabled voters in the U.S. could reach 20 million or more.
2. “Disabled” includes more different experiences and conditions than many people think.
By its most commonly used practical and social definition, (not necessarily the same as the narrower medical criteria to receive benefits like Social Security), “disabled” includes people with any significant physical, intellectual, mental, learning, or sensory disability. It also notably encompasses people from a variety of voting-eligible age groups, such as:
- a high percentage of older voters, as rates of several types of disability increase with age,
- young disabled voters thinking about higher education access, job opportunities and accommodations, health care, and benefits to help build independent and successful adult lives, and
- disabled adults who want to work, earn and save, get married, raise kids, and continue living independently on their own terms.
“Disabled” voters also include people with a wide variety of interests and competencies, as well as a wide range of accessibility and support needs. While the disabled population shares many interests and priorities in common, these can be hard to see on the surface, because of the group’s inherent diversity. It takes deeper engagement and insight for candidates to see how they can effectively reach out to the whole disability community.
3. Disability is diverse and intersects with all other identities.
Some people with disabilities see themselves, and identify themselves as “disabled.” It’s a powerful part of their identity. Others “have” disabilities, and deal with the everyday practical and social aspects of disability, but don’t “think of themselves” as disabled. Either way, most people with disabilities — both self-identified activists and those who are “just living their lives” — associate themselves with other social identities, by race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, social class and income, educational background and career, faith, philosophy, political affiliation and other connections — the same ones that make up everyone’s identities. It makes sense for candidates to engage with disabled voters as an identifiable group. But they should remember that many disabled voters also give equal or more importance to other loyalties and priorities that may have little or nothing to do with their disabilities.
4. Disabled voters’ opinions and political affiliations are varied.
Despite sharing many experiences and pressures in common, voters with disabilities as a group are not decisively wed to any one political party or ideology. A Pew Research study of the 2016 election indicated that in the close race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Clinton won the disabled vote, but only by a thin margin. Disabled voters may lean slightly to the Left, but not very much. There is little evidence that disabled people as a group are ideologically uniform or predictable enough to be an automatic part of any candidate or party’s “base.” It’s possible for disabled people to become something like a voting bloc around a few key issues, like health care, disability rights laws, and certain entitlements, like Social Security Disability, SSI, Medicare, and Medicaid. But it seems as though disabled voters are politically and ideologically polarized in mostly the same way and to the same degree as other voters. At the same time, this political divide among disabled voters persists in an environment where distinctly disability-related issues don’t get much attention from anyone. Who knows what the landscape could look like if a party, or even just a single candidate, were to become known as a true, reliable, and effective ally of people with disabilities on concrete issues they care about?
5. Disabled voters despise being patronized.
Disabled voters want to be consulted, not deployed in photo ops. They want candidates to talk with them, not about them. Disabled voters want serious and detailed policy proposals that come with plausible plans for being passed and implemented — not wild promises that appear ambitious, but are politically hopeless or a low priority from the start. Sometimes disabled voters can be too skeptical, too reflexively dismissive of any promising signals from politicians. Successful disability advocacy requires at least some faith and buy-in from disabled voters themselves. But that still implies a challenge for candidates to persuade disabled voters to take their plans and commitments seriously. Politicians who want disabled people’s votes and support have to do more than propose. They have to make their case.
6. Disabled people’s right to vote is still not guaranteed.
Some disabled people have no problem with the process of voting. But it doesn’t take much in the way of physical inaccessibility or administrative complications to make voting nearly impossible for many disabled people. Physical and procedural barriers — some obvious, many harder for non-disabled people to notice — still deter many eligible disabled people from voting. This includes inaccessible polling places and voting methods, as well as administrative burdens like ID requirements, exacting registration processes, and narrow windows of time and location for registration and voting. Anything that adds steps and takes away alternative methods and opportunities for voting suppresses the disabled vote, and effectively weakens the right to vote for all people with disabilities.
The size of the disability vote, along with its diversity and uncertain positioning to date shouldn’t discourage candidates. On the contrary, they should encourage candidates and campaigns to engage much more. Disabled voters are persuadable, if not on core political beliefs, than on crucial issues and viewpoints that cut across familiar social and political divisions in American life. Candidates who ignore disability issues and either write off or take disabled voters for granted undermine their campaigns. Those who take the time and resources to listen and connect with disabled voters are helping their effort to get elected — and hopefully their ability to do a good job once in office, for an important but often neglected community.
