In the weeks following Hillary Clinton’s staggering defeat at the hands of Donald Trump in November 2016, New York Times correspondent Sabrina Tavernise traveled to some of Milwaukee’s lowest-income neighborhoods to meet with residents who’d opted not to cast a ballot earlier in the month. Wisconsin was an obvious subject for such a study, given the pivotal role it had played in determining 2016’s electoral college outcome and the relatively small, 27,000-vote margin that ultimately handed the state to Trump. An arguably bigger reason was the precipitous drop in voter turnout that occurred in some Milwaukee neighborhoods, with one district reporting a staggering 19.5 percent decline relative to 2012.

Newly introduced voter ID laws had undoubtedly played a role, as one official with the local election commission told the Times — with Governor Scott Walker’s administration having recently put a raft of voter suppression laws on the books. But, speaking to nonvoters in several low-income neighborhoods, Tavernise found that something else was often at work: despair about systemic underrepresentation in America’s political institutions, coupled with repulsion toward the major choices on offer.