For all the good it will do. I try not to be too sour about this and remember that we Americans are privileged to be able to cast our votes and have our voices heard, etc., etc. But I have to say, it’s sometimes difficult to gin up any real enthusiasm for voting when you live in a place that’s so overwhelmingly tilted toward one side of the partisan spectrum… and your philosophy aligns with the other side. Hell, the Democrats didn’t even run a candidate for state-level representative in my district this year. I had a choice between a far-right Republican and a somewhat-less-far-right Republican who’s running as an Independent. And on the federal level, the only Democrat who ever manages to win in Utah — and he’s not even my representative, naturally — is so much of a Blue Dog that he’d probably be called a Republican any other place in the country, and yet he still has to fight tooth-and-nail every election against those who cry that he’s too liberal.
I understand why people don’t participate in the process, I really do. When it feels like your vote and your voice don’t matter, that things are going to go a certain way regardless of what you think or feel or do, and moreover they’re always going to go that way, well, what’s the point? You may as well be farting into a strong wind for all the impact you have on the inevitable outcome. And yet I go and do it every two years anyhow. It might be because my parents and Schoolhouse Rock instilled me with a sense of civic responsibility, even in the face of utter futility. But I suspect it’s something more childish, a simple act of defiance intended to show somebody, somewhere, that not everybody in this state is marching in lock-step, that there is a different opinion out there. Not that my decidedly left-of-center opinion counts one bit in Utah, of course. And so goes another election year…
Just remember that farting in the wind still brings great relief to the farter. You should be proud to have voted. It gives you the right to complain!
Everyone’s vote matters. There will always be a majority, though.
You’re right, Cheno, there will always be a majority. Likewise, there will always be people who are not a part of that majority and who will experience frustration because of it.
My own frustration stems from the fact that, here in Utah, the majority is both essentially permanent and disproportionately large. Which means there is really no accountability for our elected officials, no need to play nice with we in the minority, and no chance in hell that my ideas will ever be represented at either the state or federal level.
So — and I ask this respectfully, I’m not trying to pick a fight — tell me how my vote actually matters in any practical way. Seriously, beyond some patriotic idealism, what difference does it make if I, a Democrat living in overwhelmingly conservative Utah, bother to vote or not? My candidates never win, at either a local or a national level. As I noted in the entry, my state district didn’t even have a Democratic candidate this year. Do you really think Mike Lee is going to moderate his tea-party rhetoric because 33% of the vote went to Granato?
The sad fact is, my vote never has any effect on anything. Never. Even in 2008, when my preferred candidate won the presidency, it wasn’t because he had my vote. Utah’s electoral votes did not contribute to his victory. So what difference would it have made if I stayed in bed for another hour?
All I’m saying here is that the sense of futility gets pretty disheartening at times.
We’ve got 300 million people in the country, so I really can’t think of a better way to do it, can you?
Imagine if your vote really did count? Like we held a lottery each year and this year you get the call, “Hello, Jason Bennion? Yes, we’d like you to choose the next congressman. The candidates will be over after dinner to debate in your living room.” I don’t know about you, but in that situation, I think I’d be glad to have some other folks weighing in too…
Brian, I take your point… I can’t think of a better way to do things either, aside from maybe doing away with the electoral college and instituting some form of direct voting for the presidency. (I go back and forth on that idea; I think there are good arguments for both sides.) But that’s really not my point; I’m not saying the system is broken, and I’m certainly not suggesting that I want to single-handedly decide everything myself.
I was merely expressing the utter futility I feel because of the realities of where I live. I elaborated on this in my reply to Cheno, which I hadn’t yet published when you left your comment. I know conservatives living in San Francisco or Boston probably feel the same way I do, but there can’t be too many cities or states that are so stunningly one-sided politically as Utah is. The fact is, anyone to the left of a pretty far-right position has no influence here. It’s a struggle to get even conservative Democrats elected to a city office here, because they’ve got that little (D) next to their names, and a whole lot of people in this state are convinced that’s tantamount to being a Satan worshipper.
Utah is my home — I’ve got deep roots here and I like many, many things about this place — but because of the way things are here, I end up feeling very alienated and disenfranchised much of the time. So I bitch. It’s all I can do, really.
Jason, I agree with you that your Demo. vote in Utah will likely never have much of an effect. But you don’t want Mr/s. Republican candidate to get 99% of the votes–that would TOTALLY go to their head.
When I lived in Utah, I mostly voted Demo. for much of the same angst reasons that you have–those Repb. bums seem to have had little concern about re-election and do and say stupid things. Out in heavily Demo. NJ, I am now very Repb.–vote these bums out, maybe the next set of bums will have a pretense of non-corruption, at least for a while. There are many places that one’s single vote will mostly never have any effect.
If you want to have an effect, you have to take it to the next level. Call or write your representative. With this action, your voice increases from 1 in thousands to millions of votes to 1 in tens to hundreds of requests. Even if you didn’t vote for your particular bum, calling his office and stating that your support x, y, or z will have a much greater impact than a life time of votes.