Only about half the voting age population participated in the 2000 election, and less than half of those voted for the ultra conservative candidate who was ultimately appointed by fiercely partisan justices from his own party.
Why is that?
The answer is complex.
On the one hand there has been a decades long effort on the extreme right informed in part by a number of strongly held — and by many, I believe, earnestly held — views on a number of different issues, including abortion, the appropriate relationship between faithful Christians and the state of Israel, and a reaction to the general licentiousness of modern society.
There are also many folks out there who think as we do — that our democracy has been hijacked by cynical manipulators of public opinion — and they feel rightly disenfranchised. In order to win, we need not just money, but we need to use all our creativity and all means at our disposal to mobilize those disaffected voters. Most particularly, we need to find novel means of getting the message out that neutralize the inveitable financial advantage of our opponent, and the inevitable bias we will face from the commercial media regardless of the outcome of this poll.