The 2024 US elections are just three months away, and with polls showing a tight race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the outcome may come down to voter turnout—and data show that there is a direct correlation between income level and voter turnout. As Katherine Hapgood recently wrote in an article for the Washington City Paper, “Of the roughly 35 million Americans living at or below the $50,000 threshold widely accepted as ‘low income,’ just about half reported participating in any of the past five presidential elections, according to an analysis of 2020 U.S. Census data. By comparison, 86 percent of Americans with incomes of $150,000 or higher reported casting a ballot during the same time period.” Many poor and working-class people understandably feel that the electoral system does not represent them and their interests, but the results of elections continue to directly and indirectly impact their lives and communities. In this special #election2024 episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with RTB host Mansa Musa and David Schultz, a criminal reform and social justice advocate, about why elections still matter for all of us, and how poor and working-class people, and people impacted by the prison system, can navigate the fraught world of electoral politics to get what they and their communities need.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcipt
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to this edition of Rattling The Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I’m Maximilian Alvarez, editor-in-chief here at the Real News Network. I wanted to hop back in here on Rattling The Bars to once again put our incredible host, Mansa Musa, back in the interviewee’s seat for today because we’ve got a really important topic to discuss here today. And in fact, Mansa himself was recently interviewed for an article at the Washington DC city paper entitled, Left Out and Underrepresented. Low-Income DC Residents Are Convinced Voting Won’t Change Their Lives. And Mansa was actually interviewed along with our other guest today, David Schultz. And we wanted to make this the topic of today’s episode in part to continue the Real News’s ongoing coverage of the 2024 elections and to look at those elections from the grassroots, from the perspective of poor and working class people, and the people impacted by the prison industrial complex, the police industrial complex, right?
We want to continue to do the work that mainstream media won’t to look at American politics from the perspective of poor and working people, not the perspective of the elites. And so in this article in which Mansa Musa, aka Charles Hopkins was quoted, the article begins, “Charles Hopkins did not cast a single vote in any election for the first seven decades of his life. Hopkins has lived all of his 72 years in Maryland and DC and as a low-income Black man, he could have been neighbors with many of the federal office holders who appeared on the ballot.But looking back, he was never convinced that voting would make a difference in his daily life.”
“That’s why people don’t vote,” says Hopkins, “who lives in Southeast because why would I vote when it’s not changing my conditions?” Voters like Hopkins contribute to an enduring demographic disparity in democratic participation. Low-income citizens are less likely to cast ballots than those who make more money. Of the roughly 35 million Americans living at or below the $50,000 threshold widely accepted as low-income, just about half reported participating in any of the past five presidential elections according to an analysis of the 2020 US Census Data.
By comparison, 86% of Americans with incomes of $150,000 or higher reported casting a ballot during the same period. In 2020, the most recent presidential contest, just 7.4% of Americans who like Hopkins reported making less than $30,000 a year voted, despite accounting for roughly 9.7% of the population. Now gentlemen, I’m really, really grateful to you all for letting me hop in on Mansa’s great show and do this important interview. And David Schultz, thank you so much for joining us as well. And I really encourage folks out there to read this article in full, which we’re going to link to in the show notes for this episode.
Dave, I’m going to come to you in a second, but Mansa, I wanted to start with you and start where this article starts and ask if you could just unpack this a bit for our viewers. Now, obviously you and I are journalists for a nonprofit news network, so we can’t be out here talking about how people should vote, but we should definitely talk about how being impacted by this capitalist economy, this prison industrial system, what does that mean for low income folks like yourself and the millions of other around this country? When the news is talking about this election and any election is like the fate of democracy hangs in the balance, the future of the country is hanging in the balance. What do people like you see when you look at this election?
Mansa Musa:
I want to start out with saying Malcolm X came out with a speech called The Ballot or the bullet. And in The Ballot or the Bullet, Malcolm X made the observation that people that are disenfranchised when they register to vote or when they position themselves to vote, it should be around issues that’s relative that directly impact them. So there he is in my leading. My attitude has always been that the electoral process never really represented or never represents poor and oppressed people.
So the article, when the woman was talking about the article, she went on to say, “Okay, how do people that’s low income or no income, look at the electoral process. And we’ll add another caveat, how do prisoners look at the electoral process, post-release or pre-release? I always looked at it from the perspective that, one, it never represented the interest of me or people of my class or status.
Why? Because the candidates for the most part never really understood or tried to understand the issues that impacted me or people of similar class status or economic status. So if you saying that you representing me, the first thing you want to do is come and understand what it is that my needs are, but when you represent me, you’re not representing me, you representing the status.
So I never really felt as though from that perspective that the electoral process and electoral system was something that I would engage in actively to try to get people to become seasoned voters or registered voters or even take a campaign for candidates. Always was an impression that when I looked at it, I looked at it from the perspective that it’s not changing what’s going on me. And I seen it. While I was incarcerated, everybody that was low income whose family members was locked up, they wasn’t being asked about, “What do you think should be done about the criminal justice system?” Since your child is affected by it, they wasn’t talking about, “What you think should be done about housing and better housing? Since you live in adequate housing, what do you think about medical care and the lack of medical treatment since you don’t have it? Or what do you think about you living in a food desert?” Because that’s what it is.
They was talking about the alternative, you the alternative to not letting this person get an… Or the candidate here, A, is talking about this and he not going to do that because when I get in there I’m going to do A, B, C, D. But everything that you advocating and talking about once you get in there… And this has been ongoing on that you don’t do none of that. So that’s what really shaped my thinking.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And in this same article in the Washington City paper, our second guess David Schultz is also quoted and I want to read from this passage here which says, “David Schultz, 45, a criminal reform and social justice advocate in the district did not vote for many years, but after his incarceration, he realized how local services in his community could be impacted by funding cuts.
Now, Dave, I wanted to bring you in here and ask if you could talk a little bit about that transition for yourself as well. How you went from very justifiably feeling the same way that Mansa described so many people feeling to also then seeing how the system was still directly impacting folks like you and how elections were still making a difference even if it was a worse one.
David Schultz:
Yes. So thank you very much for having me. For starters, I had come from working healthcare administration and so I really didn’t pay attention to really a lot of the nonprofits and how they were affected by local and state budgets. And so getting out and really relying on a lot of these organizations that rely on government funding, such as the organizations that we both work for, Voices for Second Chance and Changing Perceptions.
If it wasn’t for those really helping us to guide us on a reentry journey, I know that it would’ve been a bigger struggle than it already was. Coming out and really seeing now the effect of local budget cuts and how they directly impact these nonprofits, A, I work for a number of them now, and so I can really see a coming year, fiscal year 2025, how the cuts are really going to affect a lot of organizations and a lot of support that is needed for individuals getting out, especially individuals getting out that have done 20 plus years that really are starting from scratch and now they’re not even given a fair chance to have a successful reentry journey.
They’re starting from a negative end of things. So it makes it that much harder. When these cuts are made and organizations can’t be able to support individuals such as ourselves, then it really increases recidivism to be honest with you. People get frustrated. And then community safety. As you can see, we have a big problem with gun violence here in the city as of late. And a lot of that is I think because the support has slowly started weaning off from the COVID kind of era, and budget cuts are now affecting these organizations and it’s trickling down.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s talk about that for a second, how the electoral system and the process of elections looks to you both as formerly incarcerated people, but also like to other families and communities impacted by the prison industrial complex. I mean because for folks who haven’t been impacted by that, obviously, like discourse, right? It’s just like, “Oh, both parties have contributed to the mass incarceration and the new Jim Crow,” which is true as we know, as Mansa covers every week on the show.
But there’s also a lot more to that story. There’s a lot more specifics about depending on who the sheriff is in your town, depending on what state you live in. I mean, your circumstances may change dramatically depending on who is in government at that time. So I wanted to just ask you both as people who have been directly impacted by the prison industrial complex and as two men who are fighting for justice, for those who are also impacted by that, how does that change the way that you think about and approach elections as a citizen?
Mansa Musa:
And for me, I look at it from the perspective that who the candidates are or can we find a candidate that’s going to represent our issue? I give you a case in point. In Louisiana, they got a group down there called Voices of the Enlightened Vote. And they come out, “I ain’t go to Louisiana prison.” So what they did, and I like this model, what they did is it was assured if they wanted to remove from detention center that everybody go to get locked up in Louisiana.
And so what they did was when they got out, they built this coalition around the electoral process. More importantly what they did was they identified issues that directly affected them and organized around finding a candidate that was going to sign onto an agenda that represented them. So they found this one woman they wanted, they ran for sure, and they was able to mobilize the community because everybody that was in that region was impacted by this jail.
They went to the jail, their family was subjected to going visit somebody in jail. Their family was even in the jail. So they was able to get everybody to vote and get the sheriff out. And the guy was saying, when I interviewed him on the reel on The Rattling The Bars, the guy said he was going around telling one of the guys that was advocating to remove the sheriff. He said when he was going around, people say, “Man, well the sheriff is a good dude.” He said, “Yeah, he is a good person, but he a bad sheriff and because he a bad sheriff, it’s impacting your family.”
So they got rid of the person. The new sheriff came in and did some things but didn’t do hold fast to all their problem. So from my perspective is, to answer your question, I look at it from that context that I’m more concerned with educating the returning citizen population, people that’s coming out of prison and get them to understand how we can impact the electoral process to the extent where our candidate is running or that we’re in a position where we know enough about what’s going on with the budget, where the monies are at, then we can say, “Well, we can advocate for the monies to be put into places where Dave was talking about, be put towards nonprofits doing the work to help disenfranchising them.”
So I look at it from that perspective of I don’t have no trust or no confidence in electoral system. I got confidence trust in people educating people to make informed decisions about who they want and who they going to put that vote behind.
David Schultz:
I would say for me, I’ve really paid attention now much more to… I like to see the candidates actions. I’ve learned politicians really like to say what we want to hear during election time, but when it comes down to after the election, they do what they want and we are the ones that have to suffer in the long run, meaning organizations and low income individuals. So it’s important for me that candidates make themselves available to all different groups of individuals.
I think that it’s important for candidates to have listening sessions and conversations with various partners in the community from all walks of life, not just bougie cocktail hours and law offices and things like that. But I think it’s important that they go to the cookout at the church or go to the rec center and see what the youth are talking about. They’re having problems with… Hear directly from them because I think they’re the best ones to be able to solve the issue of youth gun violence to be honest with you.
And I think it’s important for candidates to make sure that everybody has a seat at the table. I think that’s very important that I see returning citizens in some capacity in their office some way or another as long as other groups representation as well. So that’s important for me when I look at candidates kind of going forward.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to follow up on that and kind of bring this down to the grassroots level. As two organizers, I want to talk more about the kind of conversations that you get into with folks, the kind of issues that really matter to people that you’re talking to and especially when we’re talking about elections and if we’re trying to mobilize our community, our family, our neighborhood around issues that directly impact us, what are those issues and what does it take for folks to feel like they should go and vote and they should go out canvas for others to vote?
Again, the media is talking about this in one way. They’re like, “Oh, you got to go knock on doors and scare people about Trump or get people really excited about Kamala Harris and the Democrats.” But I think we know as folks who don’t come from that world that most people are worried about how they’re going to pay their grocery bill, how they’re going to get someone to watch their kids, how they’re going to keep a roof over their head.
So I wanted to ask just as two guys on the front lines of that struggle, what do you think the pundit class covering the elections in mainstream media should learn about the conversations that y’all are having and that folks in these communities are having about the election right now?
David Schultz:
Okay, yeah. So I’ll start with that one. So I would say it’s important for individuals. I think being in Washington DC obviously puts us in a unique position because we’re obviously a very political city. I guess it’s different when I go to different areas, different cities. I was just traveling. Recently, I was in Chicago, and of course it was very political there because we’re getting ready to have the Democratic and national convention. But usually it’s not.
So that puts us in a unique perspective to see how politics really affect our everyday lives. I think you’re a hundred percent correct. I think that individuals that are from smaller, more rural areas really want to see and are more concerned with that direct impact. And so elections for them kind of seem like this far away thing. It’s like they kind of drop something in a box and if they’re the person they like personality wise really, or who agrees with them on more things than the other, then that’s how they go for.
But they don’t really do their research on the candidates as well as they should to see really are they living up to what they’re saying? Are they voting this way even though they’re saying they might be voting this way? And so I think that it’s important for the pundits, so to speak, to really listen to grassroots individuals because we are the ones that matter. We are the people that they say in the constitution. We are the ones that are the make everything one. We’re the working class. So at the end of the day, our vote matters and they want our vote. So I think it’s imperative that they listen to what our needs and specific asks are.
Mansa Musa:
I think on the grassroots, when you’re dealing with a grassroots level, it’s imperative that we educate the people that’s affected because like you say, people want jobs. People want quality education. People want safe living environment. People want food quality, cheap food. As far as food prices being so high. People want rent control. They don’t want to be living in squalor and then paying astronomical fees to live there.
So it’s important that we educate… When you’re dealing with the grassroots, it’s important that you educate the population to understand that you have to find a candidate that’s going to represent your interest. When the Black Panther Party bring Bobby Seale for mayor. They wasn’t running Bobby Seale for mayor, to try to get Bobby Seale to be the mayor, they was educating people about how, like Dave said earlier, where the monies come from, how the monies are allocated, and how you can have a voice in monies being allocated to your neighborhood, to clean up your neighborhood, to have the trash collected.
How monies could be allocated towards medical or universal healthcare for everyone. So when I look at it from the grassroots level, I’m always in my mind… My mind is always in this area, educating the people about the electoral process, educating the people about, “Okay, if you get involved with this process, then make sure you had a candidate that’s going to represent your interest because the candidate is going to come and say what they think you want to hear.”
They’re going to put on all kinds of activities to motivate your interest. But when it does settle and they leave, trash hasn’t been collected. It’s high unemployment rate in your neighborhood, housing, you live in a squalor. You’re not safe and your children being targeted because you’re not safe. So when I look at it from the perspective, I look at it from a perspective that it is incoming from me and people that’s in that space to educate the people on the budget, educate the people on electoral process, educate the people on how to go about vetting account. Like you say, candidates have listening sessions.
So when a candidate have a listening session, then it’s coming from people like myself and Dave to get people to come down there and educate in electorate like ask questions about, “Okay.” Because if you don’t do what we say you supposed to do, same way we elected you in, we can get the recall and get you out.
David Schultz:
Can I just add one quick thing? Can I just say from a grassroots level to answer your other question is what the individuals are saying is the basic needs is what they’re struggling with when it comes to housing and especially affordable housing, it doesn’t matter if you’re a returning citizen, if you’re just a working class individual, that basic need is a struggle that basically grassroots individuals are really looking to have fixed this election cycle.
And just the basic necessity of being able to keep food on their table and be able to feed their kids. So I know it sounds basic, but that’s what I’ve been hearing a lot of in the community and what they are really focusing on this election cycle.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and honestly I think that’s very much in line with where a lot of our own viewers and listeners are. I mean, at least from the folks who have reached out and told us as much, the real news does have a… Contrary to a lot of other media networks, a lot of our audiences told us that they identify as low income. And because shows like Rattling The Bars working people, like everything that we do here at the Real News, police accountability report, we try to speak to the needs and concerns of foreign working class and oppressed people around the country and around the world.
I wanted to just use that as a springboard to a final question here. Because again, we’re in the middle of an election season right now, and so many of the conversations just boil down to which party are you voting for, which presidential candidate are you voting for? And that’s kind of it, right? The nuance of the discussion that we’ve been having here is just lost. But again, I want to address the people watching and listening to this right now, poor and working class people who are trying to find their own way in this election season.
People who do care about the fate of this world and if things are going to get worse for them and their family, but who have very good reason to feel a lot of animosity towards both presidential or both parties. So I guess when you’re talking to folks who are sort of in that mode who are feeling like neither party has anything to offer them, I guess where do you start the conversation about proceeding as a class, proceeding as citizens who are fighting for our needs, our interests, and our community, and holding elected officials accountable to that rather than feeling like we are just permanent team players on one side or another, but we are a class pushing for our needs and our interest.
Mansa Musa:
I think the way in that regard, one, you educate people to understand that this system is not a panacea for correcting their problems. It’s not. You look at elected officials and elected officials represent a more corporate than they represent the people. That’s why they come in and leave. But the main thing is to educate the population, to understand this system and where they can be effective at in terms of getting their needs met through this system.
Because at the end of the process, a budget going to come out. And if the people that’s in them spaces that’s impacted, stay engaged with understanding where the money is at like in the District of Columbia, all the money is being invested in downtown DC. Okay, all the money is being invested in corporate, what they call east of the river. And no money is going to east of the river. So it’s coming upon people like myself to go east of the river where I live at and educate the people about the budgetary process because, okay, the budget came out.
They say, “Well, all the money that was cut out of the budget was cut for certain reasons, and the money that’s been given to organizations or city agencies is being given for certain reasons.” So the reasons already etched in Stone. City government is being effective. People that’s not city government is not being effective. So we track that and say, “Okay, you gave 2.9 million to this city agency saying they was doing XYZ. But during the course of that year, they didn’t do nothing.”
So that money right there should go to the agencies that you took the money from. So it’s not a matter of just looking at who you’re trying to get in there, it’s a matter of staying on top of that system and making your presence known on that system because if you don’t, then the person getting in there, then we’d be saying, “Oh man, they ain’t do what they supposed to.”
No. If we stay on top of them after they get in there, then they won’t have to do what they supposed to do because they’re aware that we know. And then the next time it come around, your track record is what’s going to be used to get you out the same way you was claiming the track record to get you in. Your track record is going to be used to get you out and it’s going to be well documented.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Dave, what do you think? Final thoughts.
David Schultz:
So I think people really understand that this election really, I think people understand that democracy as a whole could be at stake, and so it’s just much bigger than the smaller issues. I think people really realize that different freedoms are at stake. And so I think with this one, it is a much… I think at the end of the day, I think the candidate that is going to stand for what’s right and fair and equitable and just, and believe in all the freedoms that America stands for is going to be the best candidate. And I think that’s what communities of low income and other marginalized communities are going to think about when they go to the ballot box.
Mansa Musa:
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