Here’s a tale of two voters. My American wife and I live in Paris, and she voted in this spring’s French presidential elections, but is also voting in a US swing state in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Meanwhile I’m a political obsessive who is only just emerging from a long stretch of disenfranchisement.
I’m British but lost my vote there after I’d been away for 15 years. When Brexit removed my European citizenship, I also lost my vote in French local and European elections. Now, happily, double enfranchisement beckons. I recently became French, and, last week, picked up my brand-new ID card at a local town hall. Meanwhile, the UK is reinstating life-long voting for Britons abroad. I’ll never miss another election in either country again. Yet I’ll also never have my wife’s electoral clout. The US midterms emphasise an unfair truth: some votes are more powerful than others, and American swing voters rank top.
If you were to write a recipe for the most powerful possible individual vote, here’s what it would look like. The ballot would be cast in a close election, with big differences between the parties. For maximum geopolitical influence, the country would have a vast economy, military and carbon footprint. That’s the United States. George W Bush, elected president in 2000 thanks to 537 possibly miscounted votes in Florida, made the world lastingly worse by invading Iraq. Democrats wouldn’t have done that, even if most did back his war to show “patriotism”.
In 2016 and 2020, a few tens of thousands of votes in three states first gave us Donald Trump and then zapped him. Both times, Wisconsin’s 3.3 million or so active voters were crucial. By contrast, the 18 million or so active voters in safely Democratic California have negligible individual power.
White voters in the US are particularly powerful, boosted by growing voter suppression that disproportionately aims to disenfranchise nonwhite people. Moreover, every state gets two Senators, and smaller states tend to be whiter. My colleague John Burn-Murdoch calculates that the average white American’s vote for the Senate is worth 60 per cent more than a Hispanic vote.
Voters in US swing states are often swayed by considerations that are ludicrous, parochial or both (such as the American football career of Georgia’s Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker) but their choices can change the world. The recent bill reducing US carbon emissions could pass the Senate only because New Hampshire elected the Democrat Maggie Hassan in 2016 by 1,017 votes. In 2024, a rounding error’s worth of extra votes making Trump president might upend geopolitics. An isolationist who has brooded over leaving Nato, he will be tempted to cut a “beautiful deal” with his hero Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, potentially spelling ruin for the Baltics and Moldova, too.
Voters in geopolitical flashpoints also have disproportionate power. We’d be living in a different world today if Ukrainians had elected another Kremlin puppet in 2019 like past president Viktor Yanukovych. And Brazilian voters can change the climate. If 1.1 million of Lula’s voters last Sunday had chosen climate-denying Jair Bolsonaro instead, then goodbye even more rainforest.
By contrast, German elections matter less, because the major parties are close on most issues. Germany is transforming now not because Social Democrat Olaf Scholz replaced Christian Democrat Angela Merkel but because all its underlying certainties have been collapsing: the US security guarantee, cheap Russian energy, burgeoning Chinese trade, and world-beating German combustion engines, which won’t exist after electric cars take over.
The smaller the electorate, the more each vote matters. The world’s most powerful voters may therefore be the 150,000 or so members of the UK’s Conservative party, who twice in three years have chosen the prime minister — a big job, since the incumbent can generally get almost any law through parliament. In true cosmopolitan spirit, the Conservatives have opened membership to anyone of any nationality, from Rochdale to Rostov.
Only about a third of the world’s population lives in a genuine democracy, estimates Our World in Data. The most powerless people live in extreme autocracies with little geopolitical clout, such as Turkmenistan or Syria. Russian and Chinese citizens too have rulers that care ever less about their views. Lev Gudkov, scientific director of the Levada Centre, Russia’s last independent pollster, told Le Monde newspaper: “The most widespread belief in Russia is that an individual can’t do anything.”
He should meet my mighty wife. As for me, in my next life I‘m coming back as a Ukrainian-Arizonan Tory party member.
Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first
