Filene Researcher Warns of Perils of Disengaged Voters

A Filene researcher said the nation is “about to harvest a huge new crop of disillusioned voters” and that population is one that should concern credit unions.

In an essay released Thursday by the Filene Research Institute in Madison, Wis., Andrew Turner wrote that eligible, but non-voting adults always outnumber voters. And whether Democrat Joe Biden or Republican Donald Trump wins, huge swathes of Americans will become disillusioned.

Disillusionment leads to disengagement expressed by non-voting, and voting patterns brings him back to his research published by Filene in March 2019 that found non-voters tended to dislike credit unions more than any other group.

Turner, a lawyer and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Law School, based part of his research on a 2018 survey of 980 voters. About 65% of Democratic voters and 60% of Republicans agreed that credit unions have a positive or very positive impact on their community. On the flip side, only 1% of Democrats and 1% of Republicans agreed that credit unions have a negative or very negative impact on the community.

However, about 28% of those who rarely vote believed credit unions had a positive impact and 9% believed credit unions had a negative impact on their community.

Taylor Nelms, Filene’s senior director of research, said the non-voting population should be of interest to all credit unions.

“Those who do not vote not only make up the majority of the U.S. population, but they also tend to be younger, more racially and ethnically diverse, and more financially precarious: exactly the folks many credit unions are seeking to reach in order to grow their business and grow their relevance,” Nelms said.

Turner’s research pointed out that the nay-sayers tended to have lower education levels than supporters. He also found a striking level of ignorance about credit unions among many groups — including credit union members. But the difference was highly pronounced between the politically engaged and the disengaged.

About half of Republicans and half of Democratic voters knew what a credit union was. Among those rarely voting, only 20% knew.

“The stronger one’s political feelings and participation, the more positive one’s views about credit unions. But the less engaged a person was, the more likely they were to dislike credit unions,” Turner wrote in Thursday’s essay.

Turner said millions of voters of both parties believe their vote is useless and are “convinced that elites and media have reasserted control at best or are trying to steal the election at worst.”

“If President Trump wins via the Electoral College, it’s easy to imagine an overwhelming sense of frustration, antipathy and hopelessness among huge swaths of the voting public.

“Paradoxically, if Joe Biden wins, not only will many conservatives have similar feelings of overwhelming frustration, many of his opponents may also be set adrift, for President Trump has forged a sense of common purpose among his opponents, from ‘never-Trump’ conservatives to centrist Democrats to progressives on the left.”

Turner offered no research to support his post-election scenarios, and he has written that his earlier research was unable to explain the higher prevalence of negative views of credit unions among those rarely voting.

In Thursday’s essay he noted that he is conducting follow-up research on why this diverse group of the politically disaffected and disengaged has negative views of credit unions. But he started with some theories:

• The new research will reveal the relationship between political engagement and unfavorable views of credit unions is less powerful than the earlier research indicated.
• The disaffected and disengaged might not have a particular problem with credit unions — perhaps they have a problem with everyone.
• Some people are simply checked out. “They’re not angry, they just hear credit unions roughly the way Charlie Brown heard his teacher – as vague mumbles at the margin of their lives, irrelevant and unhelpful.”
• They might be cynical – “not just about politics, but about the economy, business, schools and pretty much everything else.”

In the meantime, Turner recommended that credit unions help members see through the murkiness by reassessing their marketing approaches and amplifying those that are successful.

Among other things, credit unions should:

• Help people re-engage with their community;
• Reaffirm that not all values are political in a partisan sense;
• Provide a sense of empowerment, growth and opportunity; and
• Keep it concrete.

“One of the best antidotes to generalized cynicism is specific, visible accomplishment,” Turner wrote. “While credit unions can and should tout high-minded ideals of fairness, member governance and non-profit status, they should also make sure that high-minded concepts are continually grounded to real-world, tangible accomplishments tied to real people.”