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Do politicians really understand disabled voters? Do we disabled voters really even understand ourselves, or each other?
While discussing President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory speech on Saturday night, November 7, CNN Anchor Jake Tapper took a moment to consider voters with disabilities:
"This is not a community that gets a lot of attention as a political force – the disabled community – although they’re out there, if you follow the hashtag #CripTheVote you can see they’re out there and they’re very active. And Joe Biden said in his speech '...we must make the promise of the country real for everybody, no matter their race, their ethnicity, their faith, their identity, or their disability.' Something I didn’t even notice! But the disabled community heard it, and they’re there, and they vote, and they have family members and they vote."
There is always a strong temptation to offer hot takes on election results. Disabled activists may be more tempted than most to draw empowering conclusions right now. There are in fact good, solid reasons for the disability activist community to be proud of its accomplishments during this election cycle. But for that exact reason it’s also more important than ever to resist drawing too many broad conclusions about disabled voters, because we still know relatively little about them.
Sooner or later, it will be essential for everyone in politics, including the disability community itself, to move beyond gut instincts and drill down to what disabled voters were and are actually thinking.
Here are five things it would be good to know more about:
1. Did the voting rate for people with disabilities go up, down, or stay about the same?
First, it would be helpful for an update on raw numbers. About how many people with any kind of physical, mental, cognitive, or sensory disability were actually registered and voted this year? How big of a “voting bloc” were we?
Second, did the disability voting gap shrink, get wider, or stay about the same. In other words, how did 2020 voter registration and actual voting rates differ between disabled and non-disabled voters? Do people with disabilities still on average vote less than non-disabled people? Or, did the gap continue to narrow — or maybe even open up in the other direction, with disabled people voting more than most?
This year especially we also need to know more about how different states’ voting rules and procedures affected disabled people. How many disabled people voted absentee by mail compared to past elections? How many took advantage of early in-person voting, ballot drop-offs, and traditional, in-person, Election Day voting at the polls? How did these options, expanded and loosened in some cases because of the Covid-19 pandemic, affect disabled voter participation? Did the pandemic and confusion over the rules discourage disabled people from voting? Or, did having more practical choices overall make for better accessibility a rise in disabled voter participation?
Rutgers researchers Douglas Kruse and Lisa Schur have been tracking these kinds of trends in disability voting over election cycles since 2000. They plan on publishing reports on the 2020 elections sometime next year. So we can be fairly confident that we will find out what’s happened to the disabled electorate, and how barriers to voting may have changed, increased, or diminished.
2. Who did disabled people vote for this year?
It’s one thing to ask about disabled voter turnout and accessibility. It seems to be trickier and a little less common to dig into how disabled people vote in the Democrat / Republican, liberal / conservative sense. Maybe it’s because looking into voting accessibility feels more neutral and uncontroversial, while asking people who they voted for and what a group’s political profile might be feels more partisan. But at least as much thinking and strategic decision-making about disability politics and policy depends on understanding disabled people’s political beliefs as on their access to the polls.
So who won and who lost the disability vote in 2020 — and by how much? How many disabled people voted for Biden and how many for Trump? How did they choose their votes for Senators, House members, state legislators, county officials, and mayors? And how do disabled voters define themselves politically? How many see themselves as Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, Left or Right?
In September 2016, Pew Research surveyed disabled voters to ask about what they thought of the Presidential candidates, who they planned to vote for, and their general positioning on politics. They found that disabled and non-disabled voters’ political preferences were pretty similar, maybe closer than most people might assume.
Was the disability vote still split fairly evenly in 2020, as it was in 2016, in line with the general polarization of American politics? Or, did the balance tip significantly one way or another? Will we find any new evidence that disability-related experiences, concerns, and ambitions cut across other identities to affect disabled voters’ political beliefs and habits? Where are the incentives for political parties to appeal to disabled voters? And what can mobilized disabled people realistically offer to parties, candidates, and elected officials trying to properly develop and prioritize policies that resonate with disabled Americans?
Meanwhile, a core underlying question of disability politics remains — Are disabled voters shaped more by their disability experiences, or by the background political philosophies and cultural allegiances they grow up and live with? How many disabled people think about their disabilities at all when casting their ballots?
3. What issues were most important for disabled voters?
It’s not difficult to come up with a list of what we think disabled voters probably care about:
• Health care eligibility and affordability
• Long term care and support for living independently instead of in congregate care
• Job opportunities for everyone who is ready and anxious to work
• More substantial and flexible benefits that truly lift disabled people out of poverty instead of trapping them in it
• Meaningful, reliable and effective protection for disability rights
• This year in particular, confronting the many risks and hardships of Covid-19 that have landed disproportionately on disabled people.
An Easterseals survey this October suggested a rise in enthusiasm and participation by disabled voters. It also flagged health care and Covid-19 response as disabled voters’ top issues. When compared with general exit polling, this would seem to confirm many disabled activists’ instinct that the pandemic means something different and more intense for people with disabilities than it does for the general public, for whom the pandemic was apparently only the third most important issue.
Conventional wisdom suggests that disabled voters should see the pandemic as even more important than the average voter, and are more likely to be upset with the weakness and inadequacy of efforts to contain it. But as we have learned this year, there is more than one way to suffer from a pandemic, and more than one way to be upset with official responses to it.
With more data we could find that like many non-disabled people, at least some disabled people are less afraid Covid-19 itself, despite being at higher risk, and more hurt and hemmed in by mandates, lockdowns, isolation, and disruption of support services. Disabled voters placed pandemic response at a higher priority, but in what way, and with what affect on their voting decisions?
4. How many disabled voters were familiar with candidates’ disability positions and policies.
One factor that made the 2020 Elections ground-breaking for disabled voters is that multiple Presidential candidates offered them something concrete to vote for. At least ten primary candidates had dedicated disability policy pages on their websites, at least half of which were quite extensive and detailed, and developed with direct input from people with disabilities. Joe Biden was the last candidate to adopt a complete disability policy, but while it was late in coming and a bit more reserved, it incorporated may aspects of the more ambitious plans of his primary opponents.
On its own merits, Biden’s stated policies represent an important advancement for disability issues. Trump’s campaign never issued a set of disability policies, though a few spokespeople made overtures to disability advocacy groups on a handful of disability and disability-adjacent issues, like disability discrimination in medical triage policies, and abortion. Still, while it was hard to make direct side-by-side comparisons between the nominees’ approaches to disability, disabled voters did have a lot of substance to consider before voting.
But how many disabled voters knew it?
Throughout the election cycle, you could hear a fair amount of vocal support and discussion from disabled voters and activists for both candidates. People were excited and engaged with the disability policies coming out during the primaries. And there was plenty of feeling in disability culture, activism, and policy circles about the nominees’ contrasting and complex personal responses to disabled people. But in the last few months there was relatively little discussion and promotion of specific policy issues. That may be natural for late in a campaign, when candidates are focused mainly on motivating an already informed base. But it leaves open the question of how many disabled voters were fully aware of what they could be voting for or against.
One thing worth exploring for the future is how much discussions of cutting-edge disability politics is passively and unintentionally confined to a small, activated base, and what avenues might be more effective in getting specific policy messages out to “rank and file” disabled voters.
5. How did disabled voters’ other characteristics and experiences influence their votes?
If we could get questions about disability added to the standard political polling questions everyone is already familiar with we could learn so much more about how people with various kinds of disabilities think about and act in politics. It would also allow us to look at how disability intersects and overlaps with other identities and social characteristics, like age, gender, sexual orientation, income, education, employment, faith, and region. Disability-targeted surveys are helpful, but adding disability to already existing political polling would be even better.
Exit polls for United States elections are currently conducted by Edison Research, which administers the questions and presents the data for use by a pool of major media outlets. This year, the exit polls included demographic questions on gender, race and ethnicity, age, education, income, and 15 other categories, but nothing about disability. Permanently adding a question like, “Do you have any kind of disability?” to the exit poll, or offering a choice of a few main types of disability — such as physical, mental, cognitive, and sensory disability — would generate a solid base of data that candidates, political strategists, and disability activists could use to better understand how disabled people interact with politics. It would also be helpful for ordinary people with disabilities. Being able to read exit poll results that included measures of disability would prompt disabled people to think more about how their own votes might be influenced by their disabilities.
Adding measures of disability to election exit polls would be a huge step forward, not just symbolically, but in generating consistent data, which would then become a much more accurate mirror for the disability community to see itself.
Answering these five questions is important for everyone. It’s important because understanding the disability community with objective data in addition to advocates’ persuasion will help candidates craft and prioritize better disability policy, and make more effective and resonant outreach to disabled voters. At the same time, understanding what really happened with disabled voters in 2020 would help the disability community know itself better.
Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long for credible answers to these questions. Either way, it’s not too early to prepare for the the next big election cycle, in 2022. Let’s put the infrastructure in place to collect the best, most reliable information we can about what disabled people think and how they vote.
Note: Andrew Pulrang is a co-coordinator of #CripTheVote, the Twitter discussion mentioned by Jake Tapper.
