by A. Shaw

Ceilings are odd things.

The USA and Venezuela have ceilings, but the two ceilings are very different.

The ceiling in the USA says the number of registered voters is more or less fixed at something like 50% of the eligible voters and the number of participating voters is fixed at something like 50% of the registered voters. The numbers that describe the ceiling in the USA bounces up and down. But since the ups and downs cancel out each other at the level of the ceiling, the ceiling abides while the numbers bounce. So far, the registration and participation seem resistant to change, once we make these cancellations. In the USA, the ceiling is produced by the lack of capacity or will to change registration and participation.

The ceiling in Venezuela is a lot easier to understand. In Venezuela, 96% of the eligible voters are registered and the tendency is for about 80% of them to participate on election day. Clearly, those numbers are as high as they can get. In Venezuela, the ceiling is produced by the country running out of fresh voters.

Both the whole bourgeoisie in Venezuela and the reactionary wing of the bourgeoisie in the USA know how to deal with the ceiling. Instead of limiting their operations to trying to register the unregistered and to push non-participating voters toward voting machines, reactionaries in the USA and Venezuela aggressively seduce and penetrate supporters of their liberal or revolutionary opponents.

The point, in other words, is don’t ignore some active voters merely because these voters support the opposition. To identify “some active voters” reguires somebody in the campaign with exceptional skill in targeting,

Nobody is talking about dropping voter registration campaigns or dropping Get-Out-The-Vote [GOTV] operations targeted at supporters. We’re talking about supplementation of these traditional operations by a “special operation” that seeks to seduce and penetrate supporters of the opponents in a well planned and highly trained manner.

Perhaps, the best theoretical groundwork for duping supporters of the opponent is found in the work of reactionary bourgeois theorist Gene Sharp and perhaps the top guy on the practical side for this kind of campaigning is JJ Rendon, a Venezuelan political consultant based in Mexico City. According to both Sharp and Rendon, this idea of making fools out of opposition supporters is a huge expansion of the role and importance of opposition research in the campaign. Under this new idea, opposition research now has something else to do than to dig up mud and sling it at the opponent.

In the USA, the electorate seems divided into three roughly equal sectors — reactionary, liberal, and swing voters. So, it’s hard for liberals to mess around with reactionary crackpots when the liberals have swing voters to win over. This means that liberals in the USA can grow at the expense of two sources — reactionaries and swings. In Venezuela, the electorate seems divided into reactionary and revolutionary voters. More polarized. So, the revolutionaries can only grow at the expense of reactionaries.

There are specific ways that these seductions and penetrations of supporters of the opponents should take place. It’s more like an intelligence than political operation. The reactionary wing of the bourgeoisie in USA and the mass of the bourgeoisie in Venezuela know these “ways.” But the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie in the USA and the mass of revolutionary proletariat in Venezuela often repudiate these “ways” and the political end at which these “ways” are aimed, contending that a liberal or revolutionary campaign has limited resources — that is, limited time, limited people, and limited money. Therefore, resources should not be squandered on opposition supporters.

Clearly, as soon as one sees the ceiling in the spheres of voter registration and voter participation, one sees the flaws in these old school arguments. That is, after you run out of unregistereds and non-participants, you can’t rationally continue to chase only them.