True North

The idea of the “will of the majority” in the American democracy is a bit of a misnomer. Theoretically, any democracy is affected by at least 50%+1 of the population, a majority being tacit consent and/or approval to government action. Representative governments complicate matters a bit, but basically the goal of a democracy is the protection of minority rights combined with actions being the product of majority consent and representation.

The same 50%+1 democratic equation also applies to candidates running for office. Their goal should be to win the election with a majority of the voters. The theoretical ideal representative has the affirming vote from a majority of the people he represents. Campaign managers create their strategies around the 50%+1 number.

Unfortunately, this idea is a myth. Barack Obama is the Democrat Party candidate without receiving 50% of the votes from members of his party, nor was McCain chosen by anything close to a majority of the GOP party faithful. Even George Bush’s 62 million votes in 2004 represented only about 20% of United States citizens while being slightly over 50% of the vote.

The direction of the government in this country is decided by a select handful of voters. Normally about 3% of the population. Let’s go through an example to find out how I got this number; the following can be true of any district, state or region; I’ll just use a fake one with 100,000 people in it.

Of the 100,000, we need to remove all people who can’t vote. This includes some immigrants, criminals, children and others. We now have nothing but eligible voters.

Of the remaining number, eligible voters, we need to find out how many are actually going to vote. These are likely voters/actual voters.

Now there are less than 30,000 people in this region making an impact on the direction of government by voting.

Of the voting public, we now remove two groups, die hard Democrats and die hard Republicans. These people always vote and they only vote for their respective parties

Now there are only 10,000 people left. Of these, about 2,000 to 4,000 will vote 3rd party in any given year.

So, of 100,000 people, we are left with 6,000 to 8,000.

We only need one half of these people, plus one, to win an election.

All of this means of the 100,000 people in our region, only three to four thousand actually matter on Election Day.

So, the true equation of American democracy is 3%+1 not 50%+1.

Cross-posted at Martin Andrade Blogs. Comments welcome.