Quote of the Week...from Keith Ellison

Not voting is not a protest. It is a surrender.                    ---Keith Ellison

Keith Ellison is a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, a very articulate and discerning progressive who is one of my favorites in the House of Representatives.  Recently he failed in his attempt to be elected as the current Democratic National Committee chair and is serving now as deputy chair.  Ellison's quote addresses a problem I have with voters, particularly those in the Democratic Party's camp.  With presidential campaigns, getting angry because your candidate didn't win your party's nomination and sitting on your hands in November to protest your unhappiness is only going to contribute to the other party's victory...there's no point in afterwards wailing that the winner's  "not my president".  But I have a beef to make that goes beyond folks not voting as a protest (or voting for a third-party candidate instead) during presidential elections and also involves a kind of political surrender...

I know some who bemoan Donald Trump as president nearly every day I'm around them, and I tend to agree that there's a lot to criticize in this individual.  But the other day I observed a couple of such people, while viewing a news broadcast showing our Democratic senator Bill Nelson, say that they didn't even know who he was, much less his party affiliation. Yet Nelson has been one of Florida's two senators since 2001 and is nearing the end of his third six-year term, being up for reelection in 2018.  Besides standing up for Florida's interests by promoting the space program and opposing offshore drilling, his presence in the Senate has recently been crucial: his one "no" vote represented the difference between "Obamacare" surviving and being repealed in the last vote taken on the issue there...and in the near future he may well represent the difference between a Senate completely controlled by the Republicans and one in which the Democrats can exist as a viable opposition party.  Will my friends, though, even bother to show up at the polls in 2018 since, after all, it isn't about electing a president?  I doubt it: voter turnout in off-years (like 2010 and 2014) drops from presidential election years by about 20-25 %...and it seems that liberal voters taper off more than the conservatives, so it doesn't look good from the left side of the political aisle even if the president is generally unpopular.  In these cases, not voting isn't a protest...it's just plain foolish.  Too many of us seem to think that whoever gets elected president becomes the all-powerful supreme ruler, but national political power is spread among both the president and Congress...and even state legislatures, which draw up the districts for the House of Representatives.  It's time for voters to wise up and pay more attention to these offices as well...

Coretta Scott King once said, "If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children."  She's right: it is apathy among the American voting populace that is contributing to many of the wrong-headed political decisions being made by our current elected officials...