Editor’s note: This opinion piece is in response to our July 20 article “Boosting Southside turnout key to flipping seats, Dem leaders say.” The article notes a 2023 Citizens Project survey that found the primary reason Southsiders don’t vote is because they feel no candidate represents their interests.
Southside voter turnout isn’t low because your commercials weren’t good enough. We stopped listening because we don’t believe you.
Trust isn’t won by promises. It’s earned through behavior. Our communities have watched decades of campaigns where candidates show up during election cycles talking about jobs, schools, safety, housing, healthcare, and opportunity. Then election season ends and we are forgotten about all over again, leaving all the promises in the same heap of trash they came from.
If someone has experienced that cycle five, six, seven times, why would another promise change anything? Trust isn’t restored by announcing a new platform. It’s restored by keeping promises over time. The reason politics is a joke on the Southside is they talk about communities instead of talking with communities.
Political parties spend more time studying voters than listening to them. Experts run polling. Consultants analyze data. Think tanks produce reports. Then politicians announce what they think communities need. Meanwhile the people living here have been saying the same things for years: Better schools. Safer neighborhoods. Affordable housing. Good-paying jobs. Accountable policing. Strong local businesses.
We’ve organized relentlessly over these issues. Our efforts have produced every positive outcome possible while being completely ignored by everyone in positions to help the main concerns. People aren’t asking to be saved. They’re asking to be heard!
You can’t suddenly ask for trust after helping destroy it. The audacity of politicians that think they can just throw the whole setup in reverse while maintaining the status quo is astounding. And it’s mainly because they’re not from here and aren’t really trying to be. When you look around the room of any political organization you don’t see the people they are talking about. You see the same people that the Southside doesn’t know and who’ve proven year after year that we can’t trust.
The truth is institutions helped create today’s distrust – government, political parties, media, sometimes even nonprofits! Now they’re surprised when people are cynical, and will blame the victim for the low voter turnout. This cynicism didn’t appear overnight. It was taught and learned.
They don’t talk about earning respect back. Instead of asking “How do we get people to vote?” They should be asking, “Why should anyone trust us enough to vote?” Those are completely different questions. One treats citizens as votes. The other treats them as people with problems that they have to figure out with or with your so-called help.
Representation from the ballot box isn’t suffering from a messaging problem. It’s suffering from a credibility problem. You don’t rebuild democracy by convincing people to trust politicians. You rebuild it by politicians giving reasons to be trusted.
The question isn’t why people stopped voting or never started. The question is why so many politicians believe trust can be rebuilt with another campaign slogan instead of listening and then keeping their word.
