It seems strange to me that I have to defend voting against people who argue with a straight face that you shouldn’t — either because “your vote doesn’t matter” or “no one represents me”.
Trust me — your vote matters. That’s why they spend so much money trying to get it. That’s why Republicans try so hard to keep Democrats from voting.
And there are good candidates out there. Quite often they don’t make it past the primaries because people don’t vote. People don’t pay attention. They don’t get involved; they don’t read about the elections, and then when the election rolls around, they say “Hey, no one represents me” — which might not have happened had they done something about it.
I am involved in my local party. I go to meetings, I encourage candidates to run, and I’ve even run for a minor office myself (and won). I read about politics, I write about politics, and I contribute to politicians I like. And I vote. And because of this, I have a say in who these candidates are. I can affect the results.
Complaining that no one represents you in an election when you are doing absolutely nothing to change that seems like whining to me. And you know you’re going to end up with one of them, so at least vote for the lesser of the two. Surely one represents your views better than the other one.
Democracy means we are the government. We, the people. We have a say in what our government does. The candidates answer to us, not the other way around. They represent us. They are not the government, we are.
If you don’t participate, then they ignore you. And then you get what you deserve.
The people who do vote (which are pretty much always Republicans) win elections, and then the stupid Democrats think “Guess we should be more like Republicans” and move to the right. Whereas if we voted in the same number as Republicans, we would win many of the elections and no one would be saying that. But because we stay at home, our candidates lose. So what do their campaign managers say then? “We need to appeal to those people who do vote, not those who sit at home and complain without doing anything.”
It’s not going to change from the top. It has to change from us at the bottom. And complaining without action changes nothing.
A three panel federal court upheld anti-gay marriage laws yesterday. Two Bush-appointed judges ruled that, despite the precedents set by the US Supreme Court and every single other federal court that has ruled on this issue, telling citizens they can’t get married is something perfectly fine. “The voters should decide,” they argue. 
Just like they did back in the days when laws prohibited people of different races from getting married, right?
The rest of the opinion was filled with the normal crap those against equality posted: If we allow this, then we have to allow polygamy, and then the next thing you know people will want to marry their toaster. You know, the kind of ridiculous arguments that those against equality have always spouted, going back to Dredd Scott.
This decision only applies to those states under the court’s jurisdiction: Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee.
An appeal can be filed to the entire bench (an “en banc” appeal) to reconsider this decision, but it is just as likely that it will instead go directly to the US Supreme Court where this issue was ultimately heading anyway.
Despite the media spin, this result was not a surprise; all predictions had the Republicans winning the Senate.
This is not to say there were not surprises. Some races that everyone thought were safe were clearly not — a few Democrats scraped by with much smaller margins than the polls indicated — Proving again that the polls are not always right.
Presidents always lose seats in the midterms, and especially during their second term. The only time that has not happened was under Bill Clinton when the GOP showed how crazy they were with their impeachment efforts. The Republicans were smarter this time — they’ve saved the ridiculous impeachment crap for after the election.
For some reason, voters in Pennsylvania had enough of their Republican governor, whose fiscal policies drove our state into a ditch, and voted him out by a huge margin. They then re-elected all the Republican House and Senate members who enabled him to do all that damage. Go figure.
Elderly voters (who are much more likely to be conservative, Republican, and Fox-Viewing) came out to vote in record numbers, comprising 37% of the vote. Voters under 30 (and much more likely to be liberal and Democratic)? Just 12%. We only have ourselves to blame. They vote, we don’t, and they win.
The Republican effort to disenfranchise voters, combined with an unprecedented effort to gerrymander districts to give them a huge advantage, seems to be working well for them.
The Republicans constantly argued that we needed to elect them to fix the economy — ignoring the fact that the economy is doing much better under Obama than it has under any President in the last 40 years (including Reagan). States that have Republican governors are almost uniformly the ones with the worst economies. Somehow, the fact that Republicans won by lying about the economy doesn’t seem to bother them in the slightest.
Ironically, all the ballot initiatives that won were liberal initiatives supported by Democrats — higher minimum wage, marijuana legalization, women’s reproductive rights … Poll after poll shows that people support Democratic issues. Democrats just have been unable to take advantage of this.
Lost among all the election news: a court in Kansas struck down their anti-marriage statute, pushing Kansas into the 21st Century.
Now the Democrats will filibuster everything, and we’re once more left with a Congress that will do nothing. But, as I argued a few days ago, this will only last for two years.
Everyone will be bugging you to vote today, and of course you should — your vote is valuable. That’s why the politicians spend so much money trying to buy it.
But it’s also important to vote wisely. Don’t waste it.
Back in 1980 when I was a young college student, full of dreams, I worked for the John Anderson for President campaign. 
Never heard of him, have you? He ran as an independent against Carter and Reagan. Many liberals were really upset with Carter and so we drifted toward Anderson who, at one point early in the campaign, was polling about even with his two opponents. The campaign paid me to travel to Atlanta and some other places to help collect signatures to get him on the ballot, and I staffed the local Anderson office in Richmond, Virginia and helped to run fundraisers and get-out-the-vote rallies.
And then Reagan got elected. Which was the start of the downfall of America. It’s why we are in the terrible shape we are in now.
After that, I vowed never to waste my vote again. It may seem cynical to some of my more idealistic friends, but I consider it pragmatism.
Look, the system is broken, yes. But you know that, with a few exceptions, one of the major parties will win. If it’s down to the wire and the Democrat and the Republican are very close, don’t go wasting your vote on the Green party guy who is better than either of the other two. You’re going to end up with one of those two evils at the top, so choose the lesser of the two.
They’re not “all the same”. There is a vast difference between the Democratic party and the Republican party. Yes, the Democrats may not be where we want them to be ideologically, but helping to elect a Republican by voting for a third party won’t change that. We need to work within the party to make sure they discuss the issues we think are important, and we need to vote in every primary to make sure we get good candidates who share our goals.
There will be elections all over the country where a third party candidate drains votes from one of the leading candidates, causing the election of someone a majority of the electorate really doesn’t want at all. Sometimes this third party candidate will hurt the Republicans, and sometimes it will hurt the Democrats.
Think before you vote. “Sending a message” is fine, but if your message causes the election of a candidate you disagree with 100% of the time (as opposed to the one you disagree with only 50% of the time), you’re doing more harm than good.
by Guest Blogger Adam J Nicolai
If you’re a Democrat like I am, the polling for tomorrow’s election doesn’t look good. And if you’re a grass roots contributor to the Democratic party like I am, the emails you’re receiving want very badly to scare you. Subject lines like “CRUSHING FAILURE” and “All hope is lost” aren’t meant to make you feel better, after all. 
Maybe we should be scared. The prospect of the Republicans getting control of the Senate and trying their best to hinder or eliminate climate change policies is frightening. And as a father to a little girl, I should be terrified of the possibility of Mitch McConnell getting to pursue his agenda of female body control.
But the notion of Democrats losing control of the Senate doesn’t scare me. What scares me is the fact that they haven’t controlled it in years.
Despite having Democrats in charge of the Senate, there was no action on gun control after Sandy Hook. There have been no successful efforts to correct the atrocious and increasingly jury-rigged voting system. And there’s been no legislative action on one of the greatest and most immediate risks to U.S. national security we face today: climate change.
Sure, a lot of that has to do with the fact that even if something does pass the Senate, it just dies in the Republican-controlled House. I recognize that, and I don’t blame the Democrats for not being able to pass anything through the House.
But I do blame them for losing the House in the first place. I do blame them for losing Democratic votes by not standing up for what they believe in and defending their achievements. And I do blame them—oh boy, do I ever blame them—for letting Republicans set the message.
I challenge you to name one major policy discussion in this country that Democrats have set the tone on. Just one.
Healthcare? Obviously not. Even before Republicans tricked Democrats into passing the Republicans’ own healthcare plan, they were setting the message on it with such shocking catchphrases as “Death Panels” and “Socialist Medicine.” And after the ACA was passed, Republicans renamed it “Obamacare.” They did this so effectively that even the President has publicly condoned the title, a surrender in the messaging war more critical than any single election’s result.
Climate Change? Not only have the Republicans won the messaging war on this one, Democrats let them name the war.
Birth control? Gun control? Democrats are making progress here, but it’s an uphill fight—and in the meantime, the entire Progressive agenda has been rebranded under the twin bugaboos “Socialism” and “Sharia Law”—which is doubly infuriating because both of these terms are completely inaccurate.
What does any of this have to do with the stalemate in Congress, you ask? Everything.
You have to give credit where credit is due: the Republican messaging machine excels at political Judo. When Republicans control they message, they control what voters hear. They control the context for everything the candidates say. With this control, they can steal their opponents’ strengths and turn them into weaknesses—and that is what they have been doing with impunity since nearly the turn of the century.
The biggest, saddest, and most stomach-turning example of this is, of course, the Affordable Care Act.
The boasting from Democrats about their success with the ACA should be deafening. Was it a perfect implementation? No. Is it a perfect plan? No. But by and large the implementation has been successful, where governors have allowed it, and some of the Act’s baseline provisions—elimination of pre-existing conditions, keeping children on their parents’ policies until age 26, and tax credits for small businesses—are wildly popular.
But when Republicans set the message, they can force their opponents to call it “Obamacare.” Just hearing the word “Obama” will rile up anyone with even an ounce of racism in them, and don’t think for a second that his name was associated with this law by accident. Democrats are losing from the moment they say the word “Obamacare.” From there, it only gets worse. Since the only thing anyone ever hears about the ACA is that it raises taxes, raises premiums, and kills Grandma, any Democrat has a mountain of lies to fight through before they can even attempt to claim the credit they’re due, and most of them don’t even try. They run from it instead, making themselves look exactly as guilty as their Republican opponent wanted them to look. Mission achieved: Democrats did something awesome, and are being blamed instead of praised for it. Strength turned into weakness. And in five or ten years, when Obamacare is working well for everyone, watch the term suddenly become “State Exchanges” and the Republican messaging machine glibly claim credit for successful state implementation.
It doesn’t bother me that they do this. It’s brilliant political strategy, and it works. Fair play is fair play, and for whatever reason, Republicans are incredibly good at it.
What bothers me is that even today, ten years after they lost their first election on messaging, the Democratic party still doesn’t get it. They still let Republicans set the tone. They still don’t try to beat the Republicans in the messaging race—indeed, they don’t even seem to know there is a race. And when they fall behind, they dodge and scrape and whimper and look bewildered.
This is why they won’t win tomorrow.
This is why their agenda has been frozen since 2010.
This is why Obama’s presidency has been such a crushing disappointment.
And until something changes, until the Democratic party realizes that they need a Frank Luntz of their own, they will continue to lose—whether they have a majority in Congress or not.
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Adam J Nicolai is a Kindle Suspense bestseller, a father of two, an atheist, and a lifelong nerd. He’s a decent novel writer, but sucks at biographies. You can find more of his writing on adamjnicolai.com.
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