The Poor People’s Campaign highlights the political power of low-income voters

Poverty and the concerns of poor and low-income Americans have not been directly addressed in recent election cycles. (There were 63 million low-income eligible voters in 2016.) The Poor People’s Campaign makes the case to put poverty on the political agenda as a moral imperative and a political strategy to win elections. In a recently released study, Columbia School of Social Work’s Robert Paul Hartley, a faculty affiliate of CPSP, provides evidence of what could happen if low-income people voted at similar rates as higher-income voters and where new participation could flip results.