Not the presidential election. You're telling me my vote for president matters when the electoral college exists, and I live in Illinois, where we have voted blue for the last 30 years by huge margins?
This post isn't a retort to why you don't want to vote, that's your choice and you're entitled to it as an American, not voting is as patriotic as voting in my opinion, but I'd like to make an appeal to why everybody
should vote even if you don't want to:
Voting is as much an act of reflex, routine, and habit as it is motivated by belief that your vote is going to change something or that your individual vote will significantly affect some outcome. The habitual act of voting eventually, over time, has real outcomes, which is one reason why the elderly -- today's boomers -- consistently come out to vote and end up having an outsized influence on our political institutions vs. their actual demographic numbers. Social security is an untouchable political issue on both the right and left, despite that people pulling from social security and benefitting from it are a relatively small number of people, versus say something like the payroll tax. There are about 60mil people who receive some social security benefit each month, and there are about 200million people who pay some sort of payroll tax as working Americans. And yet, modifying social security is a third-rail issue in American politics, while the payroll tax is routinely modified through legislation, up and down, over administrations, it's often the first thing president's suggest to eliminate or drop during economic hardship and the first thing they raise during economic boomtimes.
The reason for this isn't only that the 200million American workers "take the long view" and know the value of social security -- if that were true then we'd have far more social benefit programs than we do -- but that voting is habitual for older Americans, and so even though they make up a minority of the electorate, the issues that are important to them end up having an outsized influence on our elections.
There are a lot of informed, engaged people who will rightly commit that "I will not vote in the presidential election
but I will still vote down ballot," but the majority of Americans don't do this. Voter engagement increases in presidential elections: midterm elections might pull somewhere between 30-40% of the electorate, while presidential elections usually pull between 50-60%, and it's important for people to reinforce that habit of voting "even if your vote doesn't mean anything because Illinois has gone blue for the last 30 years." Because for every person who lives in deep blue Chicago who says that, shares that, or validates that opinion (where it probably doesn't really matter if you, an individual progressive, show up to vote as the city is likely going to be nominally progressive anyway), there's going to be another person outside of Chicago in the suburbs who might also feel the same way and have that opinion validated. Now, for president this probably doesn't matter that much, but for legislature, senate, and then the dozens of individual state races, city councils, school committees, individual ballot initiatives... this does matter.
2012 and Illinois is a good example of this. Obama easily carried the state of Illinois in 2012, his home state and a deeply blue Democratic state. Does your vote really matter if you abstained from voting for a moderate establishment Democrat? Not for president in Illinois. But, at the same time, turnout was down throughout most of Illinois and despite that there are far more Democrats in the state of Illinois than Republicans
and that most districts throughout Illinois are blue-to-purple, Republicans won 11 congressional seats to 8 for Democrats. In 2010, a year with much lower turnout than 2012 predictable, it was worse, Republicans won 10 seats to Democrats 6. THis contributed to the Republican congress that prevented more progressive change throughout the country, and yet, by 2018, that flipped: Democrats took 11 seats, Republicans 7, which is why we Republicans didn't get to pass their Trump-resort-slush-fund bill this past week in response to COronavirus, it's why Trump is now an impeached president, it's why Americans laid off from their jobs can get a little more in their unemployment paycheck to feed their families and keep their heads above water, instead of starving or foreclosing on their homes.
For the engaged, informed voter, a call to voting even when you don't like the presidential candidate representing the party you intend to vote for doesn't really make that much of a difference: The engaged, inforrmed voter knows the value of voting in down-ballot races or issues. But most Americans are not engaged or informed; year over year, most Americans don't vote, with only a small majority voting in presidential elections, but a strong majoritty
not voting in other years. If young progressives want to have the same impact on the electorate as old conservative boomers do, if they want their existential issues like green energy policy (something that arguably affects 320m Americans, as opposed to the minority of Americans affected by social security), they need to build the habit of voting. Voting is habitual and it is contagious. Progressive issues that are important to millennials (and remember, millennials now make up the single largest voting bloc by population in the US) will never be important issues to politicians akin to social security or medicare if Progressive millennials do not build the habit of voting. While external forces -- the DNC, the media, George Soros, or whoever -- can influence your habits (e.g., "If the DNC gave me a good candidate, THEN I'd build that habit"), the single best way to build a habit is to work on it on your own just like any other habits.
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