This may surprise you, but voting is usually fun.
Election workers are happy to see you. Whoever you vote for, your presence at the polls makes them proud to do the work of democracy. You’ll make them feel good, just by showing up.
It’s likely you’ll see some of your neighbors. They’ll be happy to see you. Sometimes they’re people you haven’t seen for a while, so you’ll stop and chat, smiles all around.
Voting is a community activity as it has been for hundreds of years. We’ll all be glad to see you.
Maybe you think your votes won’t count. But the staff worked hard to develop and learn the procedures to count your votes. They would be very embarrassed if any mistake caused them to overlook your vote.
Maybe you mean something else – that your views won’t count – that you’ll be taken for granted and could “send a message” by not voting. But the message elected officials would get is that they shouldn’t worry about you, shouldn’t waste effort appealing to you about your concerns, because you won’t bother to vote. I suspect that’s exactly the reverse of what you want to tell the politicians.
Lots of people blame Harris for not supporting everything they want. But let’s understand, that’s usually because politicians are trying to please as many of us as possible in order to get elected. That’s what democracy requires candidates to do.
The solution is to build support between campaigns for what we care about. At the elections, we need to support those who are closest to where we are. Rejecting candidates for not being liberal enough doesn’t teach the parties to be more liberal – it teaches them that liberalism fails, and that liberals can’t be relied on.
There’s a huge difference between Trump and Harris on everything liberals like me care about. In each case, Harris is closer to what I want. To jump ship and vote for third-party candidates just proves that we have loud mouths but can’t do politics.
There’s another problem. No public official has complete freedom of movement. Thinking that Biden or Harris can do everything we want them to ignores the House, Senate, and the state legislatures. Without the Senate there can be no Supreme Court appointments. Without both Houses, there’s no budget and no legislation. Successful chief executives can’t bulldoze their legislatures. Eliot Spitzer tried. I chatted with legislators who should have been on his side but couldn’t wait to get rid of him – and did. The only way to get budgets and legislation done is to make deals. But to make deals you better have something to give. That makes it impossible for chief executives to satisfy some of us, because they can’t get you what you want without giving away something else you want. Executives have to prioritize; they have no choice. But critics regularly talk as if there are no competing priorities.
So, it’s important to participate in the process, go to meetings or talk to elected or party officials about what was missing for you in the choices we all had.
But meanwhile, let’s see you at the polls.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.