Sarah Massengale, a 36-year old undecided voter in rural South Carolina, felt empowered when she first reached out to Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign to tell her story.
“Their website was accessible,” Massengale, who is blind because of a congenital condition. “It was easy for me to find a place to write to her. And I felt really empowered, and I shed some tears over it.”
She said she waited and waited, and when she didn’t get a response from a staffer, chalked it up to societal dismissiveness of people with disabilities. But she said the experience stung because she thinks very highly of Harris, whom she calls “very powerful” and “very badass.”
Disability advocates say candidates often ignore their community, although the Census Bureau says more than 13% of people in the United States has a disability, and a 2021 study from Rutgers University found that 17.7 million people with disabilities voted in the 2020 election. (Another 11 million disabled adults didn’t vote that year.)
Two major national disability advocacy groups — the American Association of People with Disabilities and Disability Belongs — say they were unable to get the campaigns for Harris, Donald Trump, and earlier, for Joe Biden to complete questionnaires describing their positions on disability issues.
A third group, the National Disability Rights Network, said it asked primary candidates to do interviews with presidential candidates in advance of the presidential primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Washington, D.C. When no candidate participated, they pivoted and made a video interviewing voters.
“It’s very difficult to get candidates for public office to share responses and tell us what they think about particular issues,” said Ariel Simms, the president and CEO of Disability Belongs, an advocacy organization where most of the staff are disabled.
Disability issues are pretty much the same as everybody else’s issues, Simms said. “We have a saying in the disability world that every issue is a disability issue, or every policy issue is a disability policy issue, because no matter what we’re looking at, there’s always going to be a unique impact on the disability community,” she said.
She pointed to the ongoing conversation around the cost of living. People with disabilities spend more on health care services, mobility devices, and household services. “It’s just built into our daily life on top of paying for food and absolute essential health care,” she said.
The Harris campaign did not provide a comment for this story.
Harris told a voter at a town hall in October, “All people regardless of disability should have equal access to housing to job opportunities, to education, and again, to dignity.”
The Trump campaign disputed the idea that Trump ignores people with disabilities.
“President Trump will be a president for ALL Americans, including Americans with disabilities,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, said in a statement to USA TODAY.
LaQuanda Clark, a 41-year-old who lives in Lexington, South Carolina, criticized Trump for mocking a reporter with a disability at a campaign event in 2015. The reporter had a chronic condition affecting arm movement, and Trump flailed his arms around while criticizing the reporter’s article.
“That was a big ‘no’ for us,” said Clark, a burn survivor who had both her hands amputated.
Clark said Harris does a good job with inclusion at her events, but she’d like to see the vice president tackle disability issues head-on. Clark wants more funding for independent living agencies that help people with disabilities learn life skills and get jobs, such as the one where she works.
“As a person with a disability and also as a Black woman, I’m in a lot of minority groups, and when it comes to who’s running right now, it’s a hard decision because disabilities are not being brought to the forefront,” Clark said.
Matt Bellina, a 41-year-old from Holland, Pennsylvania, said he was a Gary Johnson libertarian before supporting Trump in his first run for president. Bellina lives with the fatal neurodegenerative disease ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease after the famous New York Yankee who died of the condition.
Trump signed a bill Bellina personally asked him to support that makes it easier for terminal patients to get into clinical trials for experimental drug treatments.
“I don’t like or dislike political figures,” Bellina said. “They are just supposed to be tools that citizens use to shape policy. Trump is a more useful tool than Harris.”
Harris has proposed having Medicare pay for home health care, a move that is widely seen to benefit people in the disability community, who often need to get institutional care through nursing homes in order for insurance to pay for it. Others have to rely on Medicaid, which has an asset limit to qualify, so people with disabilities have to spend down their savings.
“The issue with home health care is a shortage of quality candidates,” Bellina said. “Medicare coverage doesn’t address the root cause.”
Massengale called Harris’ home health care proposal “a great start,” but also said it wouldn’t benefit her. As a pre-diabetic, what she wants is a law that makes certain medical devices more accessible to people who are blind.
Speaking to USA TODAY just days before the election, she remained undecided about who to support. She said she expects to go to the polls planning to vote for one presidential candidate and to choose another when she gets into the booth.
“I don’t feel seen,” she said. “I feel seen as a woman. I feel seen as a member of the LGBTQ community. But I don’t feel seen as a blind person.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Disabled voters say the 2024 presidential candidates ignore them
