Uncast ballots
David Haddon took voting more seriously than most. His family knew this to be true long before he got sick, before he holed up in a one-bedroom home in Tucson, Arizona. The 86-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran had voted in every election since he was 18 — local, state and national. Even after his brush with cancer, and the aneurysm that followed, Haddon insisted on staying informed. He sat for hours each day in a reclining chair, eyes fixed on the television playing network news. Around him, his temporary home was sparsely furnished. Undecorated apart from photos of his children and doodles gifted by grandkids. Family and politics: Haddon's two priorities.
He lived about 15 steps away from his ex-wife's house, who checked on Haddon several times a day. Jane Bloomfield brought him meals when he became homebound. Sometimes their adult children visited from out of state. On one visit this past April, Bloomfield cooked dinner for Haddon and their son, Abram. She sent Abram off to Haddon's with two plates. Father and son chatted about the goings-on, about news and politics, and then, finally, about the ballot for a local election Haddon received in the mail earlier that day.
Abram soon returned to Bloomfield's with two sets of dishes and a look of despair. "Dad told me to throw his ballot away," he told her.
"What?"
Bloomfield immediately put on shoes and hurried over. She asked Haddon if it were true, and if so, why.
"It doesn't matter anymore."
From the trials to convict former President and current Republican candidate Donald Trump on felony charges, to the Supreme Court's ongoing arguments over the Jan. 6 rioters, Haddon felt powerless against the growing list of unprecedented events. Even President Joe Biden, who Haddon voted for, proved disappointing. The least popular president in decades had presided over a botched, bloody withdrawal from Afghanistan and an economy marked by high inflation. Yet Haddon's outlook, even amid the messy politics and tumultuous national and international affairs, was initially optimistic. "I think this is going to be OK," he'd say to Bloomfield while watching the news, "they're going to take care of it." Gradually, as the months wore on and the 2024 presidential election turned ever more vitriolic, "this is going to be OK" turned to "our democracy is done."
Haddon wasn't alone. His feeling of helplessness, his sense that democracy was imploding, and his suspicion that his vote didn't matter — all had become more and more common across the country he loved. Gallup has surveyed Americans on their view of national democracy nine times since 1984. In December 2023, the most recent version of this polling, only 28 percent of adults reported feeling satisfied with the state of democracy — a record low. No surprise then that anywhere from 35 to 60 percent of Americans choose not to vote in any given election. The last presidential race prompted the nation's highest voter turnout in modern history, and still, about a third of eligible voters didn't participate.
From those who have never cast a ballot, to those as devoutly democratic as Haddon had once been, the landscape of civic engagement is changing. For some, crossing into apathy becomes an irreversible choice. Haddon died in May, less than one month after he became so disillusioned by the political climate that he decided he'd no longer cast a ballot.
"The fact that he took that ballot and he hung his head and he said, throw it away. That was so hard for me," Bloomfield told me. "Here he was so sick, I'd seen him go through so much, but that's one of the hardest things for me that I had seen him do. Because I knew how much it meant to him."
State of the 2024 election
The presidential election has become even more chaotic since Haddon gave up on it. Biden's abysmal debate performance in June and subsequent calls that he step down as the Democratic candidate. The attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Biden dropping out and the last-minute replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris. This is uncharted territory.
Voters are left to process new candidates and new stakes on a fraction of the traditional timeline. That hasn't happened in American politics since 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson dropped his bid for reelection mid-race. Yet even then, the electorate had eight months to process the seismic shift and decide on a course of action. Today's prospective voters have had only three. That's a daunting task. For some, a deterrent.
Arizona, a historical Republican stronghold, is the newest electoral battleground in the country. The state swung Democratic in the 2020 presidential election by a margin of just 10,000 votes, a narrow 0.3 percent of ballots cast statewide. Now, as the 2024 presidential election nears its end, Arizona is again a toss-up in a race that has ceaselessly seesawed for months and is likely to end even closer than the last. And since uncast ballots shape elections just as much as votes do, it is the nonvoters — the undecided and unsatisfied — in the West's most consequential swing state who will help determine the tone of the next four years.
The most popular reason given by nonvoters in 2020 as to why they chose not to participate in the presidential election was simply a lack of interest, closely followed by a dissatisfaction with either candidate. "The key to all of this, in many ways, is that voting is not a rational act. It's an emotional act," says Thomas Volgy, a professor of political science at the University of Arizona and a former Tucson mayor. "If you are emotionally attached, either to political parties or to politics, you turn out and vote. If you are not ... you don't turn out to vote very much at all."
The same is true for the politically unaffiliated. A lack of satisfaction or attachment to either candidate more often disincentivizes independents from voting in presidential elections than Democrats or Republicans. And their numbers are rising in Arizona. Last year, independents outnumbered Republicans in the state for the first time in nearly a decade and took the title of majority party. The breakdown is split more evenly nationwide, though voters who identify as independent or otherwise unaffiliated still lead those who identify as Democrats and Republicans by two and three percentage points, respectively. This all casts some doubt about turnout in November. A Gallup survey published in May found that while 84 percent of Democrats and 78 percent of Republicans admit to giving this election "a lot of thought," only 61 percent of independents report feeling as engaged.
Yet affiliation is not the sole or even most important factor when considering why some Americans don't vote. Even among diehard party loyalists, the majority agrees that polarization is both a direct cause and effect of a failing democracy. Some 86 percent of Americans believe both Republicans and Democrats are more focused on tearing the other party down than solving matters of policy. "Everywhere in the nation, but I think especially in Arizona, we become siloed into whoever we agree with, and we go into our own media echo chambers," says Jane Andersen from the Arizona chapter of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that promotes civic engagement among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Andersen, her chapter's "protecting democracy specialist," works to curb political violence and discourage polarizing rhetoric among Arizona's elected officials. "Trying to get through the noise of everything that's happening and figuring out what is this person going to look like when they lead — that's what I feel like we have to focus on. But in our age of TikTok and 24-hour news, that is not what is focused on."
Arizona is a uniquely scaled-down model of the nation's foremost policy debates and partisan conflicts. The border state is a hub for immigration concerns. Abortion access is again slated for the state ballot. And in a region that just endured yet another record hot summer, climate change is an unavoidable topic. In other words, it's a microcosm of how party allegiances are shifting nationwide. A hotbed for election conspiracies and doubts about democracy. It's a state where stalwart voters and the utterly uninterested alike have faced the same extenuating circumstances that've made this election so unpredictable.
Politics and family
She doesn't remember how the arguments started. What small slight or poorly worded phrase curdled an otherwise pleasant family gathering into a fight. All Alice can tell me is how frequent the fights have become. A 53-year-old tax accountant in a Phoenix suburb who requested she not be identified by her real name, lest she cause more rifts with family members, Alice told me how events meant to bring loved ones together now often end in outbursts of tears and anger and division. How the last few election cycles have made gatherings among her politically active, close-knit family unbearable. How some relatives haven't spoken to each other in weeks. How she's careful not to invite certain people to the same event.
Alice identifies as a moderate Republican. Her parents and most others in her social circle veer more to the right. And when it comes to the current presidential election, she told me, "I don't feel represented at all." The way she sees her present options: Vote for a candidate she dislikes, has already voted for and been disappointed by; vote for a candidate she dislikes that could cause more rifts between her and her loved ones; or not vote at all. "Maybe this is the year that I vote by withholding my vote," she says. "That's a hard place to get to when you love your country and care about it."
She's not alone. A New York Times poll from 2020 found that 1 in 5 voters say politics has damaged their familial relationships or friendships. "It has been really hard to see some of the inner changes that have happened within our family," Alice says. "That is not the path that I want our country to go down on a national level, on a community level and on a family level." Especially when her five children — most college aged — are witness to that discord. It's already turned them off politics. "They have zero desire, due to the contention that they've seen. It weighs on me, but I don't know what the right answer is," she says. "I'm hopeful that this is just a blip. ... I hope that the future doesn't look more like this."
Young eligible voters ages 18 to 24 years old are generally less informed, less interested in politics and less likely to vote than older, habitual nonvoters. In Arizona that disconnection is even more pronounced. Four out of five Gen Z voters in Arizona don't feel like either major political party represents them, and 49 percent are consequently registered as independent. Many find politicians corrupt or disingenuous, and voting confusing.
"I would probably be more independent just because I don't really have a super strongly formed opinion, and I just feel like I don't know enough to associate with one party or the other," says a 20-year-old psychology student at Arizona State University in Tempe we'll call Megan. (She, too, asked not to use her real last name out of fear of retribution.) The 2024 presidential election will be the first where Megan is old enough to vote. When the lifelong Phoenix resident turned 18 two years ago, she called it a milestone birthday for that reason — a marker of independence and maturity, something that she'd looked forward to for years. Now, she's not so excited. She's not even sure she'll vote.
When Biden was still the Democratic candidate and debated Trump in June, Megan took stock of their immature jabs. She noticed the series of insults throughout — "sucker," "loser" and "alley cat" among them — as well as back and forth arguments about each other's golf swings. "If the two candidates that we have at the debate are talking about golf for a part of the time, it just doesn't really feel like it's something that I should be taking seriously," she says. The same goes for the obvious youth outreach efforts that have become an essential part of Kamala Harris' presidential campaign.
Harris has appeared in TikTok videos and changed her campaign's X account bio to riff on a popular internet meme, a nod to "Brat," a new dance pop album by British artist Charli XCX that's a hit among Gen Z listeners. These and other efforts have made her popular among some young voters, the chronically online in particular. But it's also been a turnoff for prospective voters who desire a more moderate, more serious president. Like Megan. "Why am I watching a TikTok of the person who can maybe be my president? It just continues the trend of making it seem unserious and not something that I should pay attention to."
Election denialism
Two months before the January 6 ransack of the U.S. Capitol, a group of election deniers armed with flags, rifles and bulletproof vests gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder's Office. The protest was a predecessor to the riot that would take place in D.C. — complete with an appearance by Phoenix-based Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, who attended both protests in face paint and a horned fur hat.
Recounts and investigations have debunked the false claims of election fraud that led to both protests. Yet they persist four years later. Nearly one-third of adults nationwide still believe the results of the 2020 election are fraudulent. Arizona is ground zero for that fallout. According to PublicWise, a voting rights organization, 46 public officials in the state have participated in election denial activities. They represent a majority of the state's constituents; 48 percent have introduced legislation for added barriers to voting, like the removal of unmonitored ballot boxes, and 84 percent have voted in favor of similar legislation. No other state has experienced more widespread closures of polling places, either. This not only makes it more logistically difficult to vote, it causes countless Americans to assume themselves powerless. A study published by The Knight Foundation in 2020 found nonvoters, regardless of party affiliation or background, often opt out because they've lost confidence in election security.
"Obviously, 2020 was what it was," says Jason Tackett, a 38-year-old resident of Queen Creek, a town about an hour southeast of Phoenix. "I think it was a springboard for a lot of people into some distrust." For Tackett, the suspicion swirling around that election led him deeper into what he calls his "deprogramming." He became an avid believer of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which exalts Trump as a messiah of sorts, responsible for dismantling a corrupt government establishment. But then Tackett listened to so many other conspiratorial podcasts; he even began to question the original theory that led him down the rabbit hole in the first place. "There's a surmounting amount of evidence that would say even the conservative savior, Donald Trump, is just part of a system that is designed to separate people," he claims. "Politics is the precipice of division."
Tackett doesn't think of himself as a conspiracy theorist. He's a devout evangelical and Harley Davidson enthusiast. He's carved out a quiet life for himself, his wife and their two young daughters, who the Tacketts homeschool. He grew up in Ohio with a set of conservative parents who were also unionized General Motors workers. Tackett never considered himself particularly political, but he's still voted in nearly every election he's been eligible for. Not this one. "I think there's a growing trend, at least in my group of people, that just see it as pointless to vote in national politics," he says. "Because whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen."
Only 61 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew Research Center in August believe the 2024 presidential election will be conducted fairly. That number drops to 47 percent among Republicans — regardless of past voting history or state of residence. A movement that largely began in the Grand Canyon State sowed seeds of doubt and distrust across the rest of the country. That skepticism can reach anyone just as easily as it reached Tackett, who is now convinced the modern idea of American democracy is a farce.
Talking to Arizona voters
I went to Arizona to find nonvoters. People who feel lost in the shuffle. But I also found something else: a willingness to move forward, even if it means changing shape.
On a Tuesday evening in late July, dozens of relative strangers navigated the tangled suburb of Mesa, Arizona, just east of Phoenix, until they all reached the same quiet residential street. Earlier in the day the temperature had hovered near 110 degrees, and heat still rose off the sunbaked pavement as guests stepped out of their sedans and minivans. Maybe it was to escape the boil, or for fear of curious neighbors peeping at them from behind window blinds, but the guests wasted no time. One by one, they filed through the front door of a white house, cracked half open.
Beside framed photos of smiling kids and crude drawings of floral bouquets along the living room walls, leaned yard signs that advertised some version of the same message: "Arizona Republicans for Harris." The attendees ranged from judges, state representatives and mayors to teachers and small-business owners. Career politicians to caretakers. Most seemed eager for Election Day; they spoke in hushed tones about a renewed energy and optimism. Others appeared to swallow a fair deal of shame. "For a lot of people, it feels like a betrayal," John Webster, treasurer for the "Arizona Republicans Who Believe in Treating Others with Respect" super PAC, told the room. Conservatives with kempt gray hair and ironed button downs mingled with Democrats in Converse Chuck Taylors and Kamala Harris T-shirts. The term "politically homeless" floated around the home. Many present were conflicted about crossing party lines in the upcoming presidential election. Others were just as unsure about sticking to them.
Here were Arizonans faced with the same uncertainties and moral dilemmas as any nonvoter. Most did not identify with either presidential candidate. All held similar fears about the future. But rather than abandon hope at the sight of a bruised democracy, they've chosen to vote because of it.
This is the turnaround Jane Bloomfield wanted for her late ex-husband David Haddon. She wished, before his passing, he could have regained even an ounce of faith in the country he spent a lifetime fighting for. If anyone could course correct for the sake of American democracy, Bloomfield thought it would have been him.
Yet Haddon's lifelong passion did count for something. Its absence has spurred Bloomfield to greater purpose. Like that odd bunch of temporarily purple voters in the Mesa suburb home, she finds it more urgent to vote than ever. Because an uncast ballot can change the course of this election as much as a vote can, maybe especially in Arizona. She knows that she will be contributing to the outcome either way. Might as well take control of it.
