We’re only a few hours from election day now, and I decided to go back and look at what I wrote after Trump won in 2016. Here’s what I wrote:
Remember this feeling. Remember how revolting tonight has been. Store this memory away, and come back to it in 2018, 2020, and in every other local, state, and national election.
Apathy has created this reality. Our generation does not vote with the consistency or conviction of older voters who hold different values than we do.
We cannot wake up and care about politics once every four years. Everyone needs to use this loss as a motivating tool to increase our engagement in the political process and to reform the Democratic Party to ensure this never happens again.
The rest of the world is looking on in shocked disgust that Trump has won, and Russia successfully influenced our election. History will not look kindly on America today, but let’s use this as the moment that we decided, together, as a generation, to start giving a shit.
November 9, 2016
I still remember that pain, and I pray enough people have decided to give a shit in the past four years that we can wrest control of our democracy away from power-hungry, fascist-adjacent conservatives who actively try to undermine our democracy through voter suppression, divisive rhetoric, and white supremacy. I don’t want to feel that way again.
The polls may be comforting right now. You might think an 89% chance is pretty great. But I don’t know how you bake into a model the abhorrent tactics conservatives are employing to sow distrust in the election’s outcomes:
- Voter intimidation (Trump telling his supporters to “watch the polls” and supporting the caravan of supporters who swarmed the Biden tour bus in Texas this weekend)
- Court cases to toss ballots in the garbage that were collected appropriately (see: Harris County curbside voting)
- Voter suppression (too many to count: Voter ID laws, limits on voter registration, weird rules for who can vote absentee, closing of polling locations in minority neighborhoods, etc)
- Republican states and courts putting limitations on when absentee ballots can start to be counted.
- Brett Kavanaugh arbitrarily arguing that we need to be able to announce the winner on election night for literally no reason
- Trump openly and repeatedly refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power
- Trump sowing distrust in the validity of absentee votes and saying he won’t commit to waiting for all ballots to be counted before declaring himself the winner. Think about this. The Republican party is intentionally making it hard to count absentee ballots quickly, and they are planning on de-legitimizing the validity of absentee ballots counted after election day. This is in total bad faith.
When you add to that laundry list of antidemocratic tactics the fact that we know that Russia and Iran are interfering in our election, it sure can be hard to trust that our election will be fair.
But we can only control what we can control. We can ensure everyone we know has voted and supported Joe Biden. Because without a landslide win, we will be in murky territory tomorrow night. If it’s not a landslide, demand that all votes are counted before a winner is announced. It very well might be election week or election month by the time we know who won. Indeed, it’s very possible that Trump may look like he’s winning tomorrow night, only to lose key states as more absentee votes are counted in the days following.
So get out and get us across the finish line. Show that you give a shit.
Purple State Progressive 