| By Bob Weaver
While West Virginia voters are giving President Donald Trump a 68% approval rating, most of them will not likely go out and vote in the November mid-term election.
Until about the 1980s, West Virginia had some of the highest voting rates in the country.
Now it is among the lowest.
The midterm election of 1998 only 29 percent of eligible West Virginians voted.
Alexander Keyssar, a historian at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who wrote "The Right to Vote," says "Parts of society remain tuned out and don't feel like active citizens. There is this sense of disengagement and powerlessness."
The effect, he said, has been a more unequal society and "more of a gap between what we say this country is about and what it really is."
Historically, governments have fought to keep women and minorities from voting, but in more recent years the party in power has essentially rigged elections with gerrymandering to insure their person stays in office.
There has been no major outcry to change that in the USA.
In the USA about 80% off college educated voters turn out to vote, while others, including those in the lower sociology-econonmic groups do not.
This year's election carries enormous political stakes, but if history is any guide, the vast majority of eligible voters will stay home on Election Day.
Slightly more than a third of eligible voters turned out across the country in the last midterm elections, the lowest share since 1942, according to Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida, who runs the United States Elections Project that tracks voting data back to 1789.
The United States' turnout in national elections lags behind other democratic countries with developed economies, according to the Pew Research Center.
The US is about 26th in voting among developed democratic nations.
Political action groups know where to spend their multi-millions of dollars to get votes, certainly since the US Supreme Court Citizens United decision, which gave corporations person hood and unlimited spending.
Many historians believe America is rapidly moving toward an Oligarchy, destructing our current form of Democratic government.
An Oligarchy is a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution, generally a ruling oligarchy enforced by military men around the president for selfish purposes.
Oligarchy's survive by illicit propaganda issued by the government, with a diminished free press.
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