American electoral politics was originally designed to make the franchise as powerful as possible for as many voters as possible, but now things come down to a tiny minority of voters living in just a few battleground states. Maybe the rest of us shouldn’t bother.
Rituals Are Fun
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Oh, Ted, it’ll be a lot less than that, if the past few elections are any indication. I’ll bet less than 100,000 in total. (Assuming no black swan events.)
2020: Trump v. Biden? That swung on about 25,000 votes. (I can show the math if needed for all these.)
2016: Trump v. Clinton? That swung on something like 40,000 votes.
2012/2008: The Obama Effect. The last black president being elected skewed the electorate heavily. Still, the first election would have required that McCain get about half a million voters to change from Obama to him in a batch of states. The second time, it would have taken about only 250,000 votes.
2004: President Cheney re-elected to continue very successful wars that definitely weren’t going to end in fiasco. That was decided by about 30,000 votes.
2000: Supreme Court decided election by one single vote — the closest election in American history.
One must wonder how much condemnation of open genocide in Gaza/Westbank is occurring during the other, stated
empty ritual: church-going
It was hard to tell, what will all the crinkling of money and clinking of coins going into the collection baskets. Funny how God never seems to be able to come up with enough scratch.
If church isn’t want you want then that’s fine of course. But if you are looking for a congregation (church, synagogue, mosque, temple, …) that matches your politics and is willing to put its money where its mouth is, keep looking — they aren’t as rare as you might think.
There are other races and propositions on the ballot too, many of which are not a fait accompli.
“American electoral politics was originally designed to make the franchise as powerful as possible for as many voters as possible . . .”
I’m not so sure about that.