Get informed and vote for more than a letter
Election season means it’s time for us to try to break our ingrained, partisan habits. Well, at least try.
You have until Tuesday to register to vote (please do!) and early voting starts Wednesday (please vote!). Based on Ohio’s registration numbers, women and people under 35 seem motivated to vote during the midterms. Hopefully, they’re just as motivated to go to the polls and hold lawmakers accountable for their votes and actions — or support them if they so choose.
Politicians bank on voters being more faithful to the R or D in front of their name instead of how they carry themselves as our representative.
On the local level — school boards, city councils, even county commissions — we’d vote people out of office if they ignored us like some of our state lawmakers do. Those local officials also have it harder because they have to live in the community they serve and rely on a much smaller set of voters. It’s easier to rely on people who simply vote R or D on statewide races since that’s what most people do.
A Pew Research Center survey found that just 4% of voters in the 2020 election planned to vote for president from one party and senator from another. A Five Thirty-eight post-election study showed little split voting, with same-party candidates within five percentage points of Joe Biden or Donald Trump in all but a handful of states.
In other words, 96% of voters don’t even really bother to understand the entire ticket.
We need to hold our lawmakers accountable for what they do, don’t do, and say. Simply voting R or D doesn’t do that.
Suggesting voters do otherwise clearly isn’t going to happen, at least not on a large scale. But that smaller scale can make a big difference. Every voter that joins along pushes us in the right direction and away from the groupthink that pollutes our politics.
During the 2018 election cycle, the last cycle with a governor’s race, 4% of the more than 4.2 million votes cast in Ohio would equal 177,183. That’s just a number to illustrate that a relatively small number of voters can have a big effect.
We also know vote splitting happens in Ohio since Gov. Mike Dewine won his race by just over 161,000 votes and Sen. Sherrod Brown won his by nearly 302,000.
People vote for the ticket because the political party often mirrors how voters see themselves and each other.
If you’re pro-life and believe in tougher immigration policies and small government, you’re likely to vote R and see yourself as a patriotic defender of the country. If you support a women’s right to choose, expanding the social safety net, and cutting emissions, you’re a caring defender of the planet who believes in justice.
And no, those aren’t stereotypes. Republicans see themselves as more patriotic, hard-working and moral, whereas Democrats see themselves as open-minded, moral and intelligent, Pew reports.
It’s a lot easier to vote for a letter because we don’t have to study positions and therefore have more time to hurl invectives at each other.
We need to remind ourselves that splitting the vote isn’t a mortal sin. The bigger transgression rests with blindly voting the ticket up and down the ballot. Here’s a stunner — there are some candidates from one party better than the other, despite the letter after their name.
While many voters would rather bang their toes with a hammer than vote for the other side, it’s important to remember that letters are just that. They aren’t character traits, marks of superiority or a badge of conviction.
Maybe that 4% can lead us out of the political blindness that many willingly suffer from.