But you know what? I’m going to take that back, and not because of the “maybe” part - but because (contrary to my prior position) I actually can think of an actual way that future elections could be impacted. In theory if there are people out there who will be demoralized by (for example) getting only 30% of the vote, but will become encouraged by getting 35% of the vote, then every* losing vote matters.
I don’t think that’s how it works for most people, but what the hey. I can retract if I wanna.
*ETA: Though of course if every losing voter voted, then encouraging them to vote next time matters not at all.
Back in the day there was a presidential candidate who agreed with you, who said that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats.
That candidate was George Wallace. The other candidates were Nixon and Humphrey.
No difference there, huh?
Honestly, it is extremely difficult to feel any optimism about the future anymore. While the Republican party has increasingly moved towards being dangerously close to fascist, the Democrats are at best enablers or worse collaborators. Given past performance, I don’t have any hope that things will improve when the Democratic Party get back into power. What a sick joke this country is. I think I lost my last shred of faith in liberalism the day Bush danced around on the Ellen Show and the attempt to rehabilitate Bush afterwards proved how morally bankrupt american liberalism is. That event showed me that human lives mean little to Liberals as long as the norms are enforced.
Ok, you lost me there. How does an ex-president’s appearance on a comedic talk show nearly ten years after being in office have anything whatsoever to do with the bankruptcy (or not) of American liberalism? I think you’re putting a little bit of undue responsibility on Ellen DeGeneres there, at the very least.
I agree with Quartz; elections are kind of like the original crowdsourcing- they display the aggregate results of the popular opinion. But they display this only insofar as people actually put forth the effort to let their opinion be officially known. If everyone, or even more than half the electorate voted, then things might be very different. But deciding that because the vote isn’t likely to go your way, that you aren’t going to bother displays, to me anyway, a fundamental confusion abut what voting actually means.
This kid’s argument is about as the same, and as silly as if he had said he is refusing to vote because he feels like his vote doesn’t count, because the electorate skews older, and he feels like his ‘young’ vote doesn’t count because of all the old geezers. It’s equally true, and to some extent more pervasive, because this electorate skew due to age crosses party lines.
His position may not be reasonable but it is depressingly common. About 55% of voting-age citizens actually voted in the 2016 presidential election. So 45% either don’t care, don’t want to bother, or don’t think their vote will count. I have no mathematical basis for saying so, but if that 45% got off their ass they might have collectively changed the outcome. A single vote may not seem to count, but after all, the election is made up of single votes.
Everyone’s vote counts for one vote. If the entire Black community votes as a block, their votes are worth about 14% of the vote. If they can gain allies, which is what political schmoozing is all about, their votes are worth even more.
If one say that one’s vote “doesn’t count” and then decides to stay home on election day and pout, one’s vote is worth NOTHING because it was never even cast.
I live in NJ, and my (liberal) vote isn’t worth the paper it’s (not) printed on, either. In the last presidential election, the chance my state was going Trump was about 0.1%, and everybody knew it from the day he secured the nomination. There was no point for either candidate to campaign here, at best Clinton would come here to fundraise so she could run off to an “Important” state to campaign for votes. My district is solidly Dem, and so are both Senators, given the current political atmosphere. I always vote, but I don’t kid myself that it matters this time around. Maybe someday, but not today.
I’ll admit that it may seem arbitrary. But, that example showed me the ugly face behind American liberalism. It showed me that liberals care more about norms, decorum and civility more than the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives that were lost in that pointless war. The fact that a good portion of Democrats are nostalgic for Bush shows me that if Trumps was just a little less rude, they would have no problem working across the aisle with Republicans to sell out the Democratic base in the name of bipartisanship.
People who have no desire to educate themselves about the issues have a duty not to vote as their vote would just dilute the votes of the informed.
He is also correct that it is not worth it to educate yourself in order to vote. One vote has never made a difference in a federal election and the odds of it ever doing so are negligible. The only reason to do so is either a sense of duty as a citizen or because it is enjoyable for its own sake.
I think that it does matter for two reasons. One, as Bump initially pointed out, there are a lot of races on the ballot that aren’t national that will matter as much, or more to your actual daily life and those vote tallies are often in the mere hundreds. Every single vote for county commissioner and schoolboard member absolutely matters. But secondly and I admit this is more abstract, your vote for the minority party is a resistance vote. It tells politicians and pollsters, “I’m here and I’m not happy!” which pushes politicians incrementally towards more median positions.
Your position sounds a bit zealot-ish. At least if the minority party works in a bipartisan fashion, they get to put their stamp on things to a degree, while if they stomp their foot and cry that they’re taking their ball and going home, the majority party will just do their thing without any input whatsoever.
And yeah, the resistance vote aspect IS important. There’s a big difference between someone winning an election 51%/49% versus winning it 70%/30%, even if the same person won both times.
The argument is that if you are certain that there is going to be a landslide against you, that the presence or absence of your vote has no chance of changing the result. The landslide aspect of this is important because the logic implicitly takes into account that lots of other people are making the same calculation. In my case, for example, I’m pretty sure the conservatives will take Idaho even if every single liberal in the state gets out and votes.
Note that this isn’t exactly an outrageous line of thought - political candidates accept it as valid too. It’s why they tend to only campaign in swing states - because getting people like me to vote doesn’t matter.
Interestingly, one could apply the same logic from the other side: “we’re so certain to win that they don’t need me”. And it wouldn’t surprise me if there were actually people on the winning side who don’t bother to vote for that very reason, though the fact that they’re voting for a winner provides an endorphin rush that the losing side doesn’t get probably gets them out to the polls a bit more regardless.
But your logic could easily apply just because you’re from a smaller state or a non-swing state. “It doesn’t matter if Idaho goes Democratic, because Texas will go Republican, and we have 4 electoral votes to their 38. So it doesn’t matter.”
It still ultimately boils down to not voting because you don’t think your candidate will win, which is missing the point.
If you’re quite sure that 50-70% of the population will vote against you, then it’s literally impossible that your vote will tip the balance. Thinking otherwise is failing math.
To be similarly certain regarding the electoral college you’d have to be certain that taking into account all the states (not just Texas) there would be no chance whatsoever of your side winning, even if even if every single state with any chance whatsoever of going your way did so. That condition has not obtained at any point in my lifetime, so far as I know.
The article’s author is also a prime example of “obvious troll is obvious”. He is probably a Republican trying to make millennials look bad. He’s allegedly a journalism student - if his op-ed piece generates clicks, he can put it on his resume when he graduates.
When I was a freshman in college, I remember coming home on break and my father (without warning) drove me to the polling place to vote. I was still registered where I was raised.
Since I went to college halfway across the country (and the first few months of college are such a blur), I told him that I did not know enough about the local issues or candidates to feel comfortable casting my vote, as I might end up going against my interests.
He told me that I should just vote how he wanted me to do so.*
In my life, I’ve probably had a handful of extremely serious arguments with my father, but that was one of them. I remember us sitting in the car in that parking lot, with me refusing to get out of the car, and him refusing to drive us home. It wasn’t until the intervention of my mother (where she chastised him for what he was trying to do [but I was also scolded for being disrespectful, in an effort to appease him]) that he finally relented, but to this day, it is somewhat of a sore subject.
Just to pick everyone’s brain, does anyone feel differently about me not voting than the author of the article. This happened about 20 years ago, so while the internet was around, information was probably harder to gather to make an informed decision since I was halfway across the country, just starting a new chapter of my life. If I recall correctly, I don’t think I was even aware that my hometown / state was having an election at that time.
*Note: Our politics are fairly different from one another’s.
If you were registered to vote there, you were registered to vote there and ballots are secret. If I really had no conception of who I thought was the better candidate in any race, I’d have looked for a write-in to mark with Mickey Mouse and turn it in.