What the election will change, and what it won't
The threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump is revealed in a child's protest
It’s time to vote. And we might take some lessons from the children. (Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash)
The dad of Nancy, a little girl in my third-grade classroom, was our small Midwestern city’s Republican chairman, so on the day after a Democrat was elected president some decades ago, Nancy showed up frowning and grouchy. Before we even stood to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and begin our lessons, Nancy knelt down in front of her desk and covered it with bumper stickers from the campaign just ended. Even 8-year-olds, silently watching this protest, understood that the stickers didn’t matter anymore. But it was okay: Our thoughtful teacher waited before asking us to open our spelling books, apparently reasoning that letting Nancy express her disappointment would be a good lesson for us all.
And what was that lesson, at least in the eyes of the little patriot who now writes this column? That whether we are jubilant or disconsolate at the outcome of an election, the work of the day will go on. It must, in fact.
In saying, “Get on with it, then,” I don’t mean at all to imply that elections don’t matter. We have certainly learned that, if ever we doubted it, over the past eight years. Just before Election Day in 2016, the Washington Post headline on a piece by Pulitzer-winning columnist Kathleen Parker declared, “We’ll be fine no matter who wins.” You’d think the Post would have published a correction by now: We were not fine, in fact, during Donald Trump’s presidency, nor have we been fine in any of the years since Trump’s approach to politics and government began to obliterate the respectability of the Republican party and devastate the norms of behavior that have sustained American democracy for 250 years.
Consider the record: Trump introduced a new level of coarseness in campaigning and prevarication in politics, spouting more than 30,000 false and misleading claims during his four years in office, and inspiring legions of eager liars to follow his example. He fired whistleblowers and truth-tellers, obstructed legal investigations, politicized the administration of justice and turned his public trust into a profit center for his businesses. He pushed through tax breaks for the wealthy that added trillions of dollars to the federal debt, which limits what government can now do for everybody else. His fondness for tyrants abroad weakened the power of our allies, and his attempt to extort a political favor from Ukraine led to his first impeachment. Then, of course, came his lie about the 2020 election results, and his effort to overturn its fair result, which provoked a lethal attack on Congress by his misled supporters — a mob that roamed the capitol, hoping to find and hang the vice president. That led to his second impeachment, and his acquittal thanks to cowardly partisans.
Incredibly, even more could be said about Trump’s shameful record. Sadly, the truth has been obscured from tens of millions of Americans by the obfuscation of overtly partisan media, starting with Fox News and now including Elon Musk’s grossly perverted social media platform, X. So as we approach the third straight Election Day with Donald Trump on a national ticket, America is more divided and we are angrier with each other than ever in our memory, with a larger share of our citizens deceived by flagrant lies and intentional distortions, and the nation’s economic health and the free world’s political stability imperiled by the very real prospect that a malignant narcissist will return to the White House.
No, we will not be fine if Donald Trump wins this election, any more than we have been fine since he glided down a golden escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy. No wonder voters are warned frankly by many who might be expected to be his advocates — his former chief of staff and former defense secretary, a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the last two Republican vice presidents — that Trump shouldn’t get close to the Oval Office again.
But whether he wins or loses, we will go on. Voters are in the process of choosing either the radical Christian nationalism and helter-skelter policymaking of Trump or the inclusiveness and prudent agenda for progress laid out by Kamala Harris. The tally after the polls close on Tuesday will change things, but the reality is that the only thing those numbers will end is an election cycle. That is, while Trumpism has changed America and will continue to change us and our country for the worse if he is re-elected, our task will be the same, one way or the other: to go on from here with energy and determination.
In the election years after my little friend Nancy offered her silent classroom demonstration of defiance, our teachers did their best to give students lessons in democracy. There were civics classes, student government elections and, in presidential years, mock elections where kids pretty much revealed what they had been hearing at home.
Lately, though, teachers have grown wary of all that. An elementary school on Long Island cancelled its 2016 mock election after students repeated “negative rhetoric about minorities” that they had picked up from conversations and news coverage of immigration. That was a precursor of what was to come in the next two elections. A survey of K-12 teachers this year found that most teachers wouldn’t be conducting mock elections — more than half because they don’t teach a relevant subject, but nearly a quarter because they feared “parent complaints,” and 19 percent because they doubted that “students can discuss this topic with one another in a respectful manner.”
That’s hardly surprising, given how vicious political dialogue has become in the Trump era. Kids, after all, absorb messages about what behavior is acceptable through media and what they witness at home. It’s another mark of Trump’s pernicious impact on democracy, with potentially long-lasting impact: A population that’s neither trained nor experienced in democratic norms will be more compliant with those who are careless with their preservation.
Few American schools do a good job of civics education nowadays. Only a handful of states require a whole year of civics training in the march toward a high school diploma, and when it is taught, the instruction typically focuses on memorization, lectures and textbook learning — hardly the stuff to excite interest. Financial support from the U.S. Department of Education is meager: Civics education in elementary through high school annually draws roughly 0.4 percent of the amount that is devoted to science, technology, engineering and math.
And this paucity of good training in citizenship has long-term effects, because kids exposed to civics education are more likely to vote — which is, of course, the fundamental act of civic engagement and the gateway to a more patriotic and involved citizenry. Beyond that, there’s the impact on years to come. Recent research suggests that voting is habit-forming. After a review of studies on the topic, researchers from Duke and the University of Southern California concluded, “The more people had voted in the past, the more they continued to do so out of habit, as if they didn’t have to think much about what they were doing.”
Interruptions in the voting habit, though, can have lasting results. Even the weather can disrupt voting patterns for years to come. A study of rainfall on election days from 1952 to 2012 found that just a millimeter of rain depressed voter turnout by 0.05 percent — a minimal amount, except in the context of the habitual nature of voting. That is, those rain-averse non-voters are less likely to show up the next election, and therefore those after that. Similarly, recent voter suppression legislation in many Republican-run states — like culling voters who missed successive elections and banning same-day registration — will likely have a long-term effect: People who show up to vote this year and find their names struck from the rolls or ineligible because they don’t present proper identification are less likely to make the effort next time.
If there is any good news about civic life arising in the Trump era, it may be this: The prospect of electing or defeating Donald Trump is apparently drawing people to the polls. During the half-century or so since I became a voter, an awful lot of Americans got lazy about citizenship. Through the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, barely more than half of the people who could vote did so in presidential elections, and far less than that in off-year elections. That began to change, though, after George W. Bush was declared president in 2000 despite losing the popular vote. Barack Obama’s popularity twice drew more voters to the polls. And then, four years ago, two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots either for or against Donald Trump. That 2020 turnout marked the highest percentage of Americans voting since 1900. If that trend continues this year — that is, if more registered voters turn out at the polls — the result will reflect both the reality of the Trump record and the threat that his return to the presidency would present. And Kamala Harris will be our next president.
Yet we know that Tuesday won’t settle things. Trump’s team has spent months preparing to mount legal challenges to results that don’t favor him, and the candidate has been laying the pipe to again claim he was cheated — for example, by raising unsubstantiated claims about non-citizen voting and voter fraud in Pennsylvania. The ground is fertile for this sort of fib: About 70 percent of Republicans buy into Trump’s lie that Joe Biden’s 2020 win wasn’t legitimate, despite the absence of evidence to support that view. And one-fourth of Republicans say, incredibly, that if Trump loses, he should do “whatever it takes” to assure that he becomes president. An intelligence bulletin from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned last month of “a threat of violence to a range of targets directly and indirectly associated with elections through at least the presidential inauguration.” And DHS bulletins are warning of a “heightened risk” that right-wing violent extremists — who are, of course, Trump supporters — could “attempt to initiate civil war.”
That shows the deep damage to democracy already wrought by Donald Trump, and the danger he presents for more. Consider his violent language: asking this week what Liz Cheney would do when “guns are trained on her face,” repeatedly calling his political opponents “the enemy within,” suggesting Democrats are more a threat to America than any foreign power. In any previous era of American history, Trump’s actions and rhetoric would have been simply unimaginable in a presidential candidate. They are shameful today, as is the blithe support he draws from nearly half the electorate.
How far we have come, indeed, from the innocence of the quiet protest my little friend Nancy mounted when her family’s candidate fell short in an election. Nancy’s approach is more like what we would see on a large scale if Kamala Harris should lose this election. There is little doubt that Harris’s disappointed followers would pursue what has been America’s tradition before Trump: a sad acceptance of loss, demonstrations of solidarity with the cause at stake, and a determination to fight on through the democratic system to bring victories at the polls in years to come. It is both touching and tragic to realize that little Nancy, age 8, displayed greater patriotism and understanding of our American democracy than our former president does today.
And that underscores the stakes of this election, and why you must do everything you can to make its outcome one that strengthens our democracy.
NEWSCLIPS FROM THE UPSTATES
Dispatches from our common ground *
Wherein each week we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illuminating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.
This week, we share reporting published here:
Burlington, Vt. (Burlington Free Press, burlingtonfreepress.com)
Aberdeen, S.D. (Aberdeen American-News, aberdeennews.com)
Reno, Nev. (Reno Gazette Journal, rgj.com)
Stoughton, Mass. (The Patriot Ledger, patriotledger.com)
NOTE: The complete “Newsclips from the Upstates” section, and The Upstate American Midweek Extra Edition, which is sent to email boxes most Wednesdays, are available only to paid subscribers. Thanks for your support!
VERMONT: State offers mobile homes to ease shortage
The U.S. is now short about 4.5 million homes — because people can’t find the houses they need and can’t afford what’s available. Vermont has a pilot program that may be a model: Dan D’Ambrosio reports in the Burlington Free Press that the state is poised to sell mobile homes at cost to income-qualified people who lost their homes in recent flooding, a program that will be opened to others soon. There are limitations: Many people can’t afford even the wholesale cost of the homes, and the state only has funding right now for 30 mobile homes — which might lead some to suggest this is more a press release than a program. But the state is offering counseling and logistical help, and it’s hard to imagine that success won’t prompt the Democrat-led legislature to expand the program. Andmight there be copycat states elsewhere?
SOUTH DAKOTA: Political friction yields polling place conflict
State law prohibits anyone from displaying “campaign posters, signs, or other campaign materials” at a South Dakota polling place, or nearby. But as reported by Stu Whitney of the nonprofit South Dakota News Watch in the Aberdeen American-News, that’s not exactly what local officials intend to enforce. The Republican who is the top election official in Minnehaha County, the state’s most populous county, has amended county regulations to allow political campaign apparel to be worn to the polls. This is unsurprising: Leah Anderson, the county auditor elected two years ago, had claimed on a podcast with My Pillow founder Mike Lindell, a conspiracy theorist, that roughly 24,500 ballots were potentially unaccounted for from the 2020 election in Minnehaha County — which she later conceded was closer to 283. A University of South Dakota poll found that just 21% of Republicans were “very confident” that the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be counted accurately, compared to 75% of Democrats.
NEVADA: Panic buttons at the polls
Washoe County, which includes Reno, is considered one of the nation’s most consequential areas for potentially swinging the presidential election. Mark Robison reports in the Reno Gazette Journal that the prospect of political disruption by Donald Trump supporters has prompted the county for the first time to issue panic buttons at all voting sites — so poll workers can summon police quickly in the event of violence or other disruptions. In early voting, most disputes have involved partisan clothing, which is forbidden by state law, and only once have police been called. But state law recently also has been strengthened to deter unrest. “It's now a felony to harass election workers, and I hope that's a deterrent as well, that it might make somebody think twice before trying to harass an election worker,” a county official said.
MASSACHUSETTS: Beware that wish for youthfulness
Federal prosecutors have charged a Massachusetts spa owner with injecting thousands of clients with fake Botox shots. Chris Helms reports for The Enterprise of Brockton that a 38-year-old woman — an aesthetician who claimed to be a nurse — smuggled counterfeit beauty drugs and devices into the U.S. from China and elsewhere over a three-year period and sold them to customers, reaping some $900,000 in payments for thousands of beauty shots. “The type of deception alleged here is illegal, reckless and potentially life-threatening,” a federal prosecutor said.
BONUS VIDEO
My great friend Niki Haynes, an artist who is best known for her brilliant collages, has created a short video with a message appropriate for this election season. You won’t want to miss it. Check it out here.
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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.
-REX SMITH