The Perils of Polling

I walk into the voting booth like someone who hasn’t been to class in three months walks into a final. I know nothing. I have frantically googled a few names on the walk to the polling booth, though I’m honestly just choosing the Democrats that have the coolest names/that people online praise. I know that’s stupid, but people fought for me to be able to kick into that curtain, vote C on everything, and turn it in. There were marches and sit ins and court cases that made this all possible. Susan B. Anthony got jumped by a bunch of men and Martin Luther King got shot for me and others like me to blindly decide the fate of the country.

It’s not like I’m an ignorant or that I usually don’t try to know people’s credentials, but nowadays it is hard to be informed. I think the newest tactic of making the news and politicians so hard to watch is pretty impressive if I’m being honest. Have you tried googling a Democratic or Republican candidate recently? It is a horrific labyrinth of confusing contradictions and unreliable endorsements. It’s so hard to be an informed voter because no one is hiding anything anymore. If you tried to hide anything, it gets dragged up and tossed around the interwebs like a volleyball. Whether you’re a sexist bastard or you lied about eating cake when you were six, the world knows and you are being judged for it.

To be fair, my method isn’t unlike any other time period. The earliest days were literally a nepotistic dumpster fire. Not saying the Founding Fathers didn’t do a good job, but if the whole country was able to vote, we may have gotten some different results. The Civil War brought about party loyalty, and the early 1900s saw candidates buying the love of the public with eccentricity (cough cough, Teddy Roosevelt) and random promises to certain groups (which is how we get Columbus Day, in case you’ve ever wondered) By the time the 60s rolled around, everyone was taking candidates for their face value... literally. JFK won public favor just by being sexy.

Nowadays, we cling to party loyalty, so much so that third-parties have no chance and haven’t since George Wallace ran in 1968 when he won at least one state. There is no underdog story in US politics. Sure, Obama was a long shot but that was a race thing. He was attached to a large political party and had a following, and there were few political blips in his career that he could be slapped with (like Hillary, who tried the same thing but has been rather unsuccessful). Honestly, once that video of “where was Obama when 9/11 happened?” came out, I think I knew Obama would win.

American politics are like betting on a racehorse. The horses have stats and their jockeys are known, but no one cares. You pick a name or you pick based on the odds and cling to your ticket and pray. Similarly, no one takes a chance on the “underdog”. We go with someone because going out on a limb is a “wasted vote”. But is it? I don’t know honestly. No one does. It’s like choosing a different symbol in tic-tac-toe or getting the blue checkers out. It can happen and it doesn’t really affect the game that much, but it takes a special type of person to do it, and be successful. Similarly, people are so used to red or blue that they don’t even consider any other color. It’s a shame really because some of these people are not terrible. These politicians have goals and platforms that just get ignored time and time again.

Another part, the part that actually made me give up on finding a candidate that aligns with my thoughts, is that I can’t find anyone for my platform. The closest was O’Malley, that third guy in the 2016 debate who was on the left of Bernie and Hillary. His platform was infrastructure and gun control. He talked about a child who had been shot in the head getting a hearcut and complained about the shittiness of the roads, which was totally relatable. But, he was overshadowed for being too realistic. Politicians nowadays focus on the big topics and try to scream the loudest. Free healthcare, free college, repealing Roe v. Wade... Believe it or not, it will never happen.

We need smaller solutions. Big things are harder to dismantle (as most of this stuff has developed over hundreds of years) and pass both houses and be seen as constitutional. I think O’Malley was onto something. His solutions were small. Let’s stop having an environment where kids can get shot in schools and let’s fix these shitty ass streets. I was here for it, but he just wasn’t captivating enough. Plus, third-parties appeal to me because they are out of the box. They focus on shit that bothers you but isn’t a big-ticket item. The way public schools are funded, the way public transit runs, housing equity, he homeless, school programs. I would happily vote for a third party that stood for all of this stuff because that’s the basis of their platform and that’s what they’ll do. Meanwhile, I feel like Red and Blue are so used to screaming an answer at topics that it’s not as genuine.

I guess I vote like people who don’t watch football root for teams is because like football, this kinda doesn’t matter to me. Don’t get me wrong, I know it is high-stakes and hurts/helps people nationwide and worldwide in some cases. People fought for me to be able to vote just like they fought for my cousin to be allowed to be in the NFL and treated right and have good health programs. Similarly, understanding the way that politics truly affects everyone would help us with these big-ticket items that get dragged up around the presidential election years and dropped by December. Granted, there will always be more work, but a lot of it starts at the lower levels.

The NFL is not perfect. This is mainly because people don’t see problems with some things. The way things have been going is some of these players are really smart and aware, but others are just hustling to get the most money possible to spend recklessly and others are just so used to being passed along for the sake of football that they can’t address some of the issues the NFL has. Issues like concussions, the difficulty of coming back from an injury, the possible long-term health effects as well as the difficulty of dealing with being in the limelight and the financial struggle if your career ends early is seen as just part of the game when they could change.

But, that would have to be taught early. If high school football players were forced to do good in classes, learn time management, learn financial responsibility and understand their rights as players rather than just being encouraged to get up to that level, players would have more rights. Similarly, politics need to be emphasized on all levels. Just participating in national elections doesn’t make you a responsible voter. Being an informed voter is voting at every level because the judge in your county will affect you more than the Justices ever will. Only like 5% of cases presented to the Supreme Court will be heard by the justices. Meanwhile, an elected judge could be a hardass and sentence your kid for 5 years for robbery, which can lead them down a very negative road since prison reform is going rather slowly.

I spent years hearing that my vote matters, but not knowing which vote matters and why. We are encouraged to vote in presidential elections because you need a lot of votes to say that it was a fair vote. But, if Congress is mostly Republican, why does it matter if Biden wins? As we saw in Obama’s first term, he couldn’t do anything he promised because it was always met with a deadlock. Meanwhile, Trump is making it an amendment to wipe his ass because everyone in Congress agrees with his party. Personally, I think the way to bypass schools and shit is to get politics as popular as Instagram/celebrity drama. Honestly, it is just as juicy, but until everyone is as invested as schools make it seem like we should be, it won’t really matter who I vote for.

In short, I go blue because in the 1960s, Kennedy’s party convinced many black people to switch from being Republican (which had previously been a progressive party before WWII, during which democrat FDR increased public welfare) to being Democratic. Later, after Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, thousands of newly registered black voters flocked to the polls and braves all sorts of injustices to vote blue. Now, I can’t imagine being Republican because Democratic values are now riding on the history of helping everyone. Personally, I’d rather listen to Biden struggle to talk for four years than spend another second of seeing Melania squint at the sniper keeping her there while her dumbass husband belligerently spews hate. Though honestly, I would give all my votes to Rocky De La Fuente (who ran as a third party last year and is a Republican this year) because we are really losing the chance to have a President De La Fuente. Think about how cool that sounds. President De La Fuente. It will never happen, but I like to think it would one day.