Over the last two weeks, our televisions have been full of political speakers, as the Democratic and Republican national conventions have been held, mostly in a virtual format.
Both parties are pushing their messages hard, but lately, those pushes have been sending the ardent supports of either further to the left or the right.
One of the biggest flaws in our last two presidential elections is the method of campaigning. All we hear about is how terrible and horrendous the other party’s candidate is, rather than what they will actually do for Americans as president.
President Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spent the entire 2016 campaign vilifying each other, and it seems we are headed down that same track again. This is bad for America and our democracy.
We need to elect leaders who we believe in. Americans are tired of being presented a choice between the so-called “lesser of two evils,” and no matter what you think of our given candidates, that is how they are presented to us.
We just went through a primary system that, while disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, is flawed and broken to begin with. The American presidential primary is about as rigged as any political scenario can get.
Take New York City for example, where 84,000 of the 403,103 mail-ballots for the Democratic primary were disqualified for various reasons, including lack of postmark or signature. That’s a 26% invalidation rate, which brings about alarm for multiple reasons.
First, it is a foreboding portend for what could be to come in November with the mail-in ballots, but equally alarming is that no one really cares whether those votes get counted or not. Joe Biden was in the bag for the Democratic Party long before Americans got any chance to decide who they wanted to represent them, as it happens nearly every year for the non-incumbent party.
Between the rigged primaries, the negative campaigning and the irrelevant issues that always come up in presidential elections, Americans are getting fatigued with the entire process, which is not healthy for our longstanding republic.
We cannot afford to have divisive politics mutate into widespread voter apathy, something that will undoubtedly begin to affect our local elections as well. We just saw the voter turnout in Habersham County drop by nearly half from the June 9 primary to the Aug. 11 runoff, and while the pandemic created strange times for some of these trips to the polls, that is still a disturbing trend considering that major decisions for our state and county were made by around 27% of the registered voters.
The political split at the top of our nation has trickled down, and that is not going to help any of us. We need to find ways to work together, whether it’s across the aisle in Congress or just listening to someone else’s viewpoint that may differ from ours.
Collaboration and compromise are the foundations of democracy, not fear and mistrust.