Decoding the U.S.'s 92 million non-voters

Non-voters are the biggest wild card in U.S. electoral politics, a cohort of some 92 million adults who are eligible to vote, but seldom do so. They’re eclectic, with distinctive blocks that reliably support Democrats and Republicans – but don’t show up to cast their ballots -- and an even larger one that is completely alienated from a political milieu they find bewildering, corrupt, irrelevant or some combination thereof. These blocks are so large that when a campaign is able to motivate even a portion of one, they can swing an election, which is what allowed Donald Trump to reduce the “Blue Wall” of Upper Great Lakes states to rubble in 2016 and Barack Obama to flip North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and Indiana in 2008. What these blocks do in November will likely decide the 2020 election and the survival of the republic as we’ve come to know it.

But who are they? Why don’t they vote? What can motivate them to change their mind?

Lat week, the Knight Foundation released the results of “The 100 Million Project,” the largest and survey of chronic non-voters in history. More than 12,000 were polled across the country, with special emphasis on ten battleground states, followed by in-depth focus group conversations with thousands of them across the country. You won't want to miss what they learned.

I had advanced access to the report and its authors and travelled to Philadelphia earlier this month to report this in-depth POLITICO Magazine story on this poorly understood portion of the U.S. citizenry. Input from Chris Arnade, Ibram Kendi, Meredith Rolfe, Eitan Hersh, Yanna Krupnik, the More in Common "Hidden Tribes" team, and many others. Hope you enjoy.

I last reported from Pennsylvania for POLITICO in 2016, on a very different topic, the redevelopment of the massive Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Is Pittsburgh in the Midlands?, a redux

One of the great American Nations debates is whether Pittsburgh should be in the Midlands (it should!) or in Greater Appalachia (which some argue for.) For the past five years, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff columnist Brian O'Neill has been occasionally revisiting this question, starting in 2013, with a personal lament that I put his city in the Midlands, and again earlier this year, when he conceded the Appalachian label might not be quite right either.

This week he calls in a third party perspective with this delightful conversation with a self-identified Appalachian, Eric Jester, who argues for an Appalachian identity for the city.

"It's an ambitious man who defines the identity of a people who struggle [to] do so for themselves," Jester says. "The Appalachian in me loves the way a ridgeline dips into some tight little holler with a name like Scotia or Calamity; the way an orange stream dances around and under a tight winding road to the Youghiogheny; the way those fading miners' hoses sag a little in the middle."

Hope you enjoy the piece as I did.

For the record: I'm sticking with the Midlands, though I certainly agree that county-level resolution doesn't capture the subtleties of even first order regional cultural geography. But this placement is due to early settlement history, and to revealing events like the 1794 (Appalachian) siege of the city during the Whiskey Rebellion and not, as Jester writes, because of some "assumption that a beautiful city, a center of education and technology, and an historical hotbed of progressivism, could ever be associated with Appalachia." Greater Appalachia has a great many cities with most or all of those attributes -- Cinci, Louisville, Roanoke, Charlotte, Asheville, Winston-Salem, Nashville, Dallas, and Austin, just to name a few -- and the region pretty much gave us the "democracy" part of our liberal democracy, much to the trepidation of most of the Founders.

Now if only we could get Columbus's columnists to weigh in on that city's inverted status: Appalachian in American Nations, with many residents arguing for the Midlands.....

Is Pittsburgh in the Midlands?

In the seven years since American Nations was published, most readers have endorsed their county's placement among the eleven regional cultures I write about in the book. Two locations have generated some sustained pushback, however, both of them border cities on the Midland-Greater Appalachia frontier: Columbus, Ohio (assigned to Greater Appalachia in large part because of lingual evidence) and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (a clear-cut Midland city in my reading of history, but surrounded on three sides by Greater Appalachia.)

This week, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staff columnist Brian O'Neill revisited his city's regional identity in this column, where he emphasizes its competing influences and seems to concede that calling it Appalachia might not be sufficient. It's a nice synopsis from the field, and represents a bit of a shift from our friendly debate in 2013, when O'Neill lamented the city's Midland designation (it's "the Paris of Appalachia" he insisted.)

As for Columbus, I've heard both pro and con arguments from readers there for its Appalachian designation, but nothing from the city's intelligentsia. Let's hope they weigh in one of these days -- the Cleveland Plain Dealer did in regards to the Western Reserve's Yankee character in comparison with southern Ohio's Appalachian one -- but not a word from the Dispatch.

[Update, 1/1/2019: O'Neill revisited this topic again in December.]

At EDMC, former Maine governor McKernan had a questionable legacy

I did a deep dive on former Maine Governor John McKernan's legacy as CEO and board chair of Education Management Corporation, or EDMC, the for-profit college network that ran afoul of the US Department of Justice, multiple state attorneys general, and the inspector general of the US Department of Education.

Here's what I learned, in today's Maine Sunday Telegram. There's also a sidebar.

McKernan was governor of Maine from 1987 to 1995 and is married to Sen. Olympia Snowe.

How Philadelphia transformed an abandoned naval base

How did Philadelphia successfully transform a 1200-acre former naval base into a mixed-use district that some are calling a second Center City? That's the topic of my latest installment of Politico's "What Works" series on successful urban innovations. Twenty-one years after it closed, the former Philadelphia Navy Yard complex -- which once included the largest naval shipyard on the planet, a naval seaplane factory, a naval air station, and, in 1944, a top secret Manhattan Project lab -- is now a hive of commercial, industrial, recreational, and academic activity, and the next phase intends to bring residential as well.

Attending the Democratic National Convention this coming week? The convention site is not a mile away from the Navy Yard gates.

This is my fifth full-length "What Works" piece this year. The others were on how Des Moines went from dull to cool; how Manchester, New Hampshire turned its vast 19th century millyard to spinning high-tech gold; on how Denver built its game-changing light rail system, only to discover its most powerful effects were not what they'd expected; and on how Cincinnati transformed "America's most dangerous neighborhood." In addition, last week -- on the occasion of the Republican National Convention -- I had this shorter story on how Cleveland revamped its long-neglected Public Square.

American Nations among dueling maps at Washington Post

There's been a lot of talk about what America's real political regions should be on the internet of late, with Nate Silver's 538 weighing in on the Midwest and South, and the Washington Post's The Fix taking on the continent. Needless to say, I joined the fray on Twitter to argue there's never been a Midwest or a single South, proffering the American Nations map.

I've been enjoying the ensuing discussion on Twitter this afternoon -- tune in to @WoodardColin to join in the debate. As so often happens these days, that discussion has now gone full circle, landing on the webpages of the Washington Post a short while ago with this piece on the dueling maps, including the American Nations one. It's good fun, so join the discussion there.

I made the point to Nate Silver early on in these discussions that the reason so many people disagree with him that Pennsylvania is in the Midwest is because there is no Midwest. The Keystone State is instead divided amongst three regional cultures -- the very cultures in fact that make up the "Midwest", but which have very little in common with one another. For more on Pennsylvania's regional divide, a heartily recommend this recent article on that state's linguistic divides over at Slate.

And as to what region in Delaware should be in -- the question that kicked off much of this debate -- the answer is: if it must be in just one, the Midlands has the population advantage, much as it does in Maryland, so if you must use state boundaries, both states would land in that sloppy category called the "Mid-Atlantic." (That's shorthand for "States Dominated By the Midlands or New Netherland or a Combination Thereof That Happen To Lie On The Eastern Seaboard.")