Politics For Babies, Or How To Deal With The Annoying Things Low-Info Voters Will Say This Year

It’s a presidential election year, which means that all kinds of people who normally don’t follow politics will suddenly have a lot of opinions about it. It’s the public sphere version of St Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve, when the amateurs hit the bars, make a mess of the place, and embarrass themselves in public.

I’ve lived through a lot of these election years, and there’s a series of narratives that always keep coming back, like those locusts that live in the ground for years before smothering us all in their cacophony. I call these narratives “politics for babies” because they are fundamentally immature. However, they are often rooted in legitimate concerns that a party that wants to win needs to figure out how to address. Here’s the greatest hits:

“Why should I even vote? It doesn’t matter.”

I hear this one all the time. Never mind that conservative politicians are actively restricting the vote, which might be a sign that is actually matters. Never mind that only sixty years ago in Mississippi, people were being murdered over trying to get the vote. Apart from the guilt trip, I like to tell people that their vote is a power chit, maybe the only piece of hard power they actually have. Your vote might not sway an entire election, but it has to be counted and if your vote improbably breaks a tie in an election, it will be allowed to decide everything. What other thing in our lives gives us so much potential power? Not voting just means throwing away the only piece of concrete power that you have.

“Both parties are the same, bro.”

You’d think this “wisdom” had died off long ago, but nope. The Republican party wants to ban books with trans people in them, end reproductive rights, put guns everywhere, gut child labor laws, and crush unions. It’s not the same as the Democrats by any reasonable measure! To be sure, there are some frustrating areas of consensus, but that loses the forest for the trees. For instance, both parties’ leadership backs military aid to Israel in the current war and both are beholden to corporate interests at some level. Only a baby would think that makes them the absolute same, though.

“We need more third parties.”

Again, this comes from an understandable place. We really don’t have a lot of options in our system. The thing is, that’s the outcome of the way our elections are set up. If we had proportional representation, we’d have a lot more parties. In fact, I am all for a system like that and really do wish we did not have a two-party system. The thing is, that system is the natural outgrowth of our first past the post system. where the top vote getter wins the election. If we had proportional representation or ranked choice that would open up room for more parties, but the way our elections work makes third parties inevitably weak. The problem is that the people who say they want more options are such babies that they don’t advocate for either proportional representation or ranked choice because they have no clue what they are.

“We Need Term Limits”

This sounds like a great populist idea, but it’s not. Term limits take decisions out of the hands of voters. For instance, had Barack Obama been able to run for a third term in 2016, Trump never would have been president. Our idiotic decision to limit the president to two terms bit us in the ass. Beyond that, Congressional term limits only serve to make lobbyists more powerful because they stay as Congress turns over. Term limits are the fixation of people with really limited understandings of how things actually work. Nevertheless, it comes out of a legitimate feeling that the people who run the system are not responsive to the people.

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While I’ve been a bit rough on the people who buy into the narratives I named, I do think they need to be accounted for. Due to the electoral college our elections swing based on the whims of low information voters in a marginal number of states. Those voters need to be courted. If they feel like the system is broken, well, you need to give them the feeling that you are actually going to fix it. If Democrats do not create their own counter-narratives to address this they might lose those voters and the election.