As the pageantry surrounding this year’s presidential election builds toward its climax on November 5, it’s worth reminding ourselves that, in fact, Americans vastly over-emphasize the importance of voting for their nation’s president. It’s a largely symbolic act that occurs once every four years. It’s also a very expensive act; the last election cost over $5 billion. Both our personal sanity and our communities’ health would benefit from recognizing the much broader scope of our civic responsibilities and demoting voting to its proper place.
I have very little influence over who will be sworn into office as the next US president this January. I will endeavor to care about the election to the extent that I have agency in affecting it. But a disproportionate emotional investment in this contest benefits no one and causes me needless anxiety. It really doesn’t take that much time or effort to gather the information that I need to make an informed choice about who to vote for.
And even as I make that choice, I strive to keep its significance in perspective. I have friends who will vote for Harris, friends who will vote for Trump, and friends who, like me, will vote for a third-party candidate. These days, such voting choices can rupture relationships, but in reality, there are many acts that are far more constitutive of a person’s character and identity, and there’s no good reason to shun people on the basis of who they decide to vote for.
Beyond these personal harms, our society-wise emphasize on presidential elections produces several negative effects. One is that it contributes to the rise of the captive voter. Often, these voters are so incensed by the horror of one major party candidate—and so convinced that this is the most important election in American history and that democracy itself hangs in the balance—that they will vote for the other candidate no matter what platform or person happens to be on the ballot. At that point, however, the captive voter loses any opportunity—however minuscule—of shaping the options on the ballot; there’s no need for a candidate to take the views of such captive blocs into account as they will gain these votes no matter what position they stake out.
Democracy is a messy process. Democracy entails compromises. No one gets precisely what he or she wants. But in choosing which candidate to vote for, there should be a floor beneath which you can no longer vote for a party’s representative. Magnifying the stakes of each presidential election pushes that floor lower and lower.
Conversely, one of the results of deescalating the importance of voting is that we’re freed to vote for a candidate we support rather than voting against whichever of the two major party candidates we most despise. If more people felt this freedom, the two major parties would at least feel the need to run more competent and popular candidates; in recent US presidential elections, more potential voters stayed home than voted for either of the two main-party candidates. Some address the problem of low voter turn-out by hyping the importance of voting, but a more effective method might be freeing people to vote for candidates they actually support.
A second negative effect that a myopic focus on presidential elections has is to turn our attention away from state and local affairs. The decline of local news has many causes, but one is our obsession with national politics. As our attention is drawn away to events over which we have little agency, we neglect those matters that we could engage more meaningfully.
An indication of the dangers of over-valuing voting and national politics more broadly can be seen in Eitan Hersh’s book Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. Hersh finds that many Americans, particularly those with a college education, engage with politics like it’s a hobby. They get worked up over political events but don’t get meaningfully involved in their own communities: “Daily news consumers are very interested in politics, so they say, but they aren’t doing much: In 2016, most reported belonging to zero organizations, having attended zero political meetings in the past year, and having worked zero times with others to solve a community problem.” Putting the act of voting in proper perspective might help more of us see the importance of other, more significant, forms of political engagement.
A democracy is not kept by filling in a ballot bubble once every four years. It’s kept by responsibly and virtuously exercising our freedoms in our homes, communities, and institutions day by day. The franchise is not the only or even the most important way of participating in civic life, and it’s this full participation—not mere voting—that lies at the heart of democracy.
Image via Free Malaysia Today
Well written and thoughtful and true, Jeff. (And Hersh’s book is quite wonderful, one more FPR readers should be familiar with.)
Extremely well-put, Jeff, especially your argument that if we want more people to vote, it might be actually more effective to de-emphasize the importance of voting (relative to other things).