A Vote for the Ancestors, a Vote for the Future, and a Vote for Simple Math
Nancy Pelosi is a comfortable politician. I write these late-December musings from a warm space within her fortress district of San Francisco. She’ll have her seat in this liberal bastion as long as she wants it. But Speaker Pelosi leads a caucus full of uncomfortable politicians, with vast constituencies outside the tech-inflected walled garden San Francisco has become. A solid minority of her caucus has put reelection on the line by voting YES with nearly the entire Democratic bloc on two Articles of Impeachment on 45.
As it boils down on the talking head shows, they are mostly freshmen or “moderate” Democrats fighting to keep their seats in districts that voted for the Republican candidate in 2016. These milquetoast takes fail to note that 2018 saw the largest midterm election turnout in a generation or two. It was a repudiation, plain and simple. Folks are watching, and there’s more of us than there are those who would, by casting their vote, endanger all our lives.
The Senate will vote to acquit, unless perhaps Dems win the ability to #SubpoenaTheSecretServer before the trial. Unlikely. Our opponent is clear. His minions are suppressing the vote by the hundreds of thousands in states like Georgia and Wisconsin as I type. Stacey Abrams, the people’s governor and leader of #FairFight as well as #FairCount, is the most prominent member of an ecosystem of organizers who are fighting back. There are all sorts of strategies being employed but at its core this is a massive door-to-door campaign with tight deadlines to make sure state primaries and the general election are operated fairly. The folks doing this work are heroes for democracy.
But we need more. Register, or double-check to see if there have been any mistakes related to your registration. Talk to your friends about voting (not necessarily about who you’re voting for, that’s your business if you want it to be). Especially talk to younger friends and family about it. The zoomers gotta get out. We need every single millennial who voted in 2018 to drop this topic into convos regularly. I don’t mean a conversation about politics, though I adore conversations about politics. I’m talking about the act of voting.
I vote first and foremost out of respect for our ancestors. Across a time I’ll never know outside of the histories and cultural touchstones I’ve consumed, I can see the bodies of folks whose blood I may share, displayed as the centerpieces of a lively celebration in the backwoods of southern Mississippi. Folks whose bravery in attempting to cast ballots was met with lethal torture. Folks whose vicious murders went unpunished. Folks carrying a life-affirming conviction within them. I don’t need another reason to vote than we wouldn’t be here without those who came before.
But I do have other reasons. I’m a geopolitics junkie — not everyone is, I get that. And I like being on the record about what I believe should be happening; voting tickles a sort of compulsive pride I have. Local stuff can be not only hugely impactful but also pretty cool, such as my voting with the majority of Bay Area residents to increase BART funding finally resulting in new subway cars last year.
Republican democracy is imperfect but practical, even if the rules we use to improve our rules are highly restrictive. The Electoral College is inane, and the Senate is aiding and abetting a clear criminal. America languishes in an era of minoritarian rule. Two-thirds of states won’t vote to change it without some sort of massive political revolution. “Vote, And” is the name of the game. Step 1: Vote.
The vulnerable members of Speaker Pelosi’s caucus put their political careers on the line to do the right thing. Politicians’ actions are largely motivated by reelection. In just one egregious recent example, a New Jersey representative swore fealty to forty-five in the Oval Office, leaving the Democratic Party behind based on a soulless tactical agenda powered by greed. Pelosi didn’t move on impeachment until she had a clear-cut case of an act that, inexplicably, has not been described regularly as treason. (He committed treason.) She was able to hold the caucus together with only three defections largely because the criminality of this administration’s actions has been laid bare for all fair-minded folks to digest. The gravity of what we do know about the Ukraine issue resulted in polls that directed Democratic members to go ahead and do what they knew deep down they had to do. Polls (of course famously imperfect) also show a massive and frothing minority that can’t wait to solidify our collective turn toward frenetic, vain neofascism.
I vote because we have the numbers. My district across the Bay in Oakland is a fortress for Rep. Barbara Lee, who received death threats after casting the only “nay” across both houses of Congress on the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force that legalized the War on Terror. I like that she did that. She’s done some other good things. She’s mostly alright, and she has my vote. But of course, we know my vote matters less than some folks’. Do you live in a fortress district? Is your state or district purple? Is redistricting (aka gerrymandering) based on the results of the 2020 census going to affect you before November’s election? What about your friends and family? Are they registered?
The blue candidate will win if more people vote. That’s about as sure an assertion as any we can make in 2020. Regardless of what the talking heads say, the House and Senate are both in play as well. Given the slightly shaky assumption that everyone who voted blue in 2018 will return to the polls in 2020, the result depends on how many of the millions of currently unregistered Americans choose now to make their voices heard.
I’d love to hear why you vote, or if you don’t intend to, why not? Please feel free to share your story in the comments. I, of course, based on all of the above, am imploring you to choose to vote if you haven’t already committed to it. And if you are committed to it, I ask you to assist in normalizing the act. Talk to folks, tell your story. Keep voting as a topic of casual conversation in the back of your minds. Not politics, voting.
The conclusion of our current saga has yet to be written. We have more than a little bit of agency available to help develop the story. Not a lot, but more than a little. Let’s use it.
