I hear a lot about how presidential candidates are making big pushes to win over certain groups of voters, such as Black people or women. But I haven’t heard anything about candidates making even small pushes to win over voters with disabilities.
The Program for Disability Research at Rutgers University recently released a report projecting the number of Americans with disabilities who will be eligible to vote in the upcoming election. It concluded that, “The number of eligible voters with disabilities is growing with the aging of the population and advances in medical technology.” I think there are more reasons for the growth than that, but the point is still well-taken.
The report says about 40.2 million disabled people will be eligible to cast ballots, which is about one-sixth of the electorate and an increase of 5.1 percent since 2020. That is even more than the 31.1 million eligible voters who are Black or the 35.7 million who are Hispanic/Latinx, the report finds.
And that figure of 40.2 million goes up to 72.7 million when you include those who share a household with someone with a disability, which is almost one-third of the electorate, according to the report.
So why don’t candidates try to woo voters with disabilities more than they do? I think it’s largely because many of them still succumb to the stereotype that views disabled people as powerless and not worthy of being taken seriously. The only time I ever hear Donald Trump talk about disabled people is when he is using us as a symbol of inferiority and incompetence.
Vice President Kamala Harris recently unveiled her plan for expanding Medicare to cover the cost of in-home assistants, which it has never done before. This could be a monumental improvement for people with disabilities if it ever actually comes about. But Harris aimed her appeal at people who are trying to care for their aging parents.
I also think candidates are reluctant to weigh in on disability issues because doing the kinds of things that need to be done would require major changes in how public funds are collected and spent. Most politicians aren’t willing to do that.
“[P]eople with disabilities constitute a sizable share of the electorate, so their votes could influence or even determine election outcomes,” the report says. It also notes that “despite the barriers often faced by people with disabilities in exercising the right to vote,” a majority of people with disabilities did so in the 2020 election.
So candidates that choose not to engage us do so at their own peril.