Election Day 2022

When I was younger - like in my teens, and perhaps even a bit into my early 20's - I used to think that election season was a good thing. That people needed to pay more close attention to politics, that the elections, and things like debates and such actually educated people. It seemed to me that this was a golden opportunity for the country to actually improve itself.

It is probably needless to say that I no longer feel that way.

In fact, on this election day, I feel just glad, relieved really, that it is all over. Because something has changed over the course of the many years since I was in my teens and twenties, and assumed that election season was good for the country. Now granted, that may have been an overly idealized way of looking at things back then. To be sure, I believe that my enthusiasm for election season would surely have been dampened by now, even if elections had largely remained unchanged since then and now.

But remember that, at the time, it was a different world. We were not so far removed from the 1960's, when voting rights had effectively been denied to many Americans, perhaps particularly in the Jim Crow South. So people had not been quite as blasé regarding their right to vote as they have become since then. Also, serving as a reminder of just how important the right to vote is, there were powerful images of South Africans waiting for hours on very long lines, as that nation saw it's first multiracial elections, which finally brought to an end the apartheid era of strict racial segregation and the white minority rule there. And other countries, particularly in eastern Europe, but elsewhere as well, were beginning to see democratic elections for the first time in decades, if not ever. So it still felt powerful.

Since then, however, Americans in particular seem to have lost much enthusiasm for voting. I remember feeling kind of disgusted and disappointed in people who acted sick and tired of elections back then. But now, I find myself among them, admittedly.

Indeed, however, without trying to sound old or overly idealizing the past, it does feel like elections have changed, and quite a bit since then. Now, it feels like election season almost stretches literally throughout the calendar year, and especially for the presidency, which almost feels like it lasts two years nowadays. 

Here's the thing, though: there are just so many things wrong with our elections. Back then, it seemed like the biggest complain that people had was all of the negative advertisement, the character assassinations and personal attacks that dominated the commercials. Of course, that has not really changed, and is still at least as big a problem now as it was then. But added to that are even bigger problems with our elections. Gerrymandering, for example, which makes it feels like elected officials get to choose the voters, when it is actually supposed to be the other way around. An outdated and frankly broken Electoral College system that feels like it should have been gotten rid of a long, long time ago. Big money in politics, which has grown completely out of control, to the point where it feels like, again, elected officials feel more of a sense of obligation not so much to the voters who elected them, as much as to corporations and other moneyed private interests who helped sponsor their political campaigns, and who also likely hold elected officials almost at a figurative gun point, with the perhaps undeclared but still very real threat of pulling their sponsorship, and with it, of course, all of that money that seems necessary these days to win major elections, especially nationally prominent elections.

And of course, the quality of the major party candidates has not improved. In fact, it feels like they are on the decline. Frankly, just taking the most obvious politicians at the highest level as an example, it hardly feels like we are at a peak in our history in terms of the quality of the major party candidates who are nominated to be the official choice for the general election. The Clintons, the Bushes, the Trumps, or people like Obama or Biden or Romney just do not inspire confidence. In the last presidential election, Joe Biden got a record amount of votes, at over 81 million. But it feels like he received those not so much because of how impressive he is or what he had to offer, but rather because he was not Donald Trump, a very divisive and historically unpopular president. Admittedly, I voted for Biden, but like many millions of people, it was not so much because I thought that he offered a truly great vision for the country, o because he was so impressive. Rather, it was because to me, Donald Trump was just so awful, and a legitimate, bona fide threat to what is left of our American democracy, that it felt absolutely urgent that he needed to go.

That brings me to the next point: the lack of faith in our American elections. I already mentioned gerrymandering and the Electoral College, both of which seem intent on allowing candidates with less votes to emerge as the official winners. Just in the past two decades and change, we have seen two candidates for the White House who were declared the winner, even though they received significantly less votes than the other. The first, of course, was George W. Bush, and all of the things that surrounded his official win despite receiving half a million fewer votes than Al Gore. From Bush's brother being the Governor of the most hotly contested and decisive state (Florida) as well as heading the overseeing of the fairness of the 2000 election in that state (which seems like a major conflict of interest) left a bad taste in the mouth of many. And then in 2016, we had Donald Trump, who received 2.7 fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, but still officially being declared the winner. All of that feels like it undermined the faith of many Americans in our election system. 

Yet, despite having received significantly fewer votes in 2016, and having low approval ratings throughout his term in office, Donald Trump kept bragging about how historically popular he was, and how great he was. Leaving aside all of the other nonsense that systematically came with having someone like Trump and his team in the Oval Office, his perennial whining about how he was the victim of "massive voter fraud" and consistently attacking the legitimacy of elections has led to historically low trust in our American election system, and to democracy more generally. It feels like no matter who wins, elections these days are more divisive, and more hotly contested even after Election Day itself is over, than it should be. And many simply will not accept the official results, if they do not find them favorable to what they specifically want. Trump fans, for example, seem to conveniently forget that he not only officially lost the 2020 election (and remember, he also lost the popular vote in 2016), but that he also lost the 2020 election in more ways than any other American candidate (and perhaps anybody else in world history, even) by demanding numerous recounts, and contesting voting irregularities (but crucially, never actually officially arguing anything resembling actual "massive voter fraud" in court. He lost every single recount, lost 61 of the 62 court cases, many of which were presided over by judges who he himself had put in their positions. He was caught claiming that he simply wanted his team to "find" the well over 11,000 votes needed to officially become the winner in the Georgia race. No, none of that seems to matter to his supporters, who remain as convinced as ever that, somehow, Trump got cheated, and that he actually won the 2020 election. 

Of course, everybody remembers what happened on January 6th, when Trump and his supporters tried to effectively stop American democracy in order that Trump remain in the Oval Office. It failed that time. But does anyone really believe that this will somehow be an isolated incident? Now, we have clear examples of voter intimidation, with armed men in hoodies patrolling and making their presence felt near places of voting. These are things that we only used to hear about in third world countries in faraway continents. But now, we have them right here at home, in our backyard (in some cases, almost literally).

And so every election these days feels like a reminder of just how far we have fallen as a nation. We used to have elections that were respected and accepted by both sides, regardless of winners. And they produced some truly great leaders, many of whom were and continue to be respected, and even almost revered, not just here but in other countries. I know that some former American leaders, particularly Washington and Lincoln and Wilson and Roosevelt and Eisenhower and Kennedy, are honored and regarded as great in many parts of the world. These days, we seem to have mediocrity ruling both major parties, with many being sol wildly distrusted and even hated, that we have spikes in election participation not because of good ideas, but because of fear and even paranoia over how bad "the other party" is going to be. 

So yeah, I dread elections in the United States today. Right now, it is still too early to know who officially will be regarded as the winner for this election. But I can tell you right now that this much feels like it is the truth about our elections in this country in recent years: we all come away having lost something, even if we cannot define it. Someday, it might be easier to define. Because increasingly, it feels like it is our very democracy itself that we are in the process of actively losing.