What We Can Learn From This Election

It's been a long, long campaign season.  I'm pretty sure the first commercials I saw for the primaries were two years ago.  The primary was bloody on both sides.  Most of us are just glad it is over.  Now that North Carolina is a swing state, it's gotten even more difficult because we are far more inundated with campaign ads than we used to be.  Now that it is finally almost over, perhaps we can find some redeeming value in asking ourselves what we can learn from it.  I'm posting this before election day so that it won't be based on the outcome.

What have we learned?  Well,

Some people are easily manipulated.  I got to a point where I didn't want to answer my phone in the past few days because every time it rang, it was a robo-call from Invanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. (remember when we called him Donnie?), some surrogate of Richard Burr, or a myriad of others trying to get my vote.  I voted early, so these were extra annoying.  I kept wondering why these calls exist in the first place.  Who, exactly, is changing their vote because they get a recorded call?  Is there someone who was out there thinking, "Well, I was going to vote for Hillary Clinton, but now that I've gotten this call from one of the Trump kids, telling me their dad's a good guy, I've changed my mind"?  Do these people actually show up at the polls and vote?  If your vote can be changed by a robo-call, stay home.  The grown-ups are trying to choose a government.

Some people are incredibly stubborn.  As much I believe a person shouldn't be easily swayed, what we have also seen in this election is that some people CANNOT be swayed.  Once they decided on their candidate, that person was a deity.  You have that Facebook friend; you scroll past their posts because you already know what they say.  They defended everything their candidate did, no matter how awful.  I have these friends on both sides of the aisle, so it became really interesting to scroll through my Facebook and Twitter feeds after every news story.  Some of my friends think Hillary is the devil, so they actually defended the sexual assault admissions of Donald Trump.  Some hate him so much that they are fine with her breaking the law.  Apparently, once you have picked a side, logic, reason, intellectual honesty, and your own moral standards no longer matter.  I'd like to point out that this is no less childish than those who are easily changed.

The process only works when people participate.  I keep hearing the question, "How did we get these two candidates?"  The answer is that voter turnout in the primaries was low.  Only 60 million people voted in the primaries.  Those 60 million were divided, not only between the two parties, but between all of the candidates (there were 16 republican and 3 democratic candidates when we started).  Over half of the primary votes were for neither of these two candidates.  Only 9% of Americans chose these two people.  That's how we got here.  When only fanatics participate, we get some fanatical outcomes; and that's what we are seeing here.  If you don't care until you get to the general election, you can't complain with the choices you have in the general election.  If more people had voted in the primaries, we might be looking at a better outcome.

Our process, flawed as it is, still works.  Our founding fathers were not demigods, but they were intelligent and wise men.  The process they designed has ensured a peaceful transfer of power for two and a half centuries.  We have changed political parties multiple times, and guess what?  We have not had shed blood to make that happen.  In fact, we throw giant parties.  I remember being a young voter in 2000, waiting for weeks while they counted hanging chads in Florida and thinking, "How great is it that we are all just waiting for this to play out?  In many other countries, there would be rioting in the streets."  We worry and fret and wring our hands over popular vs. electoral college votes, but our constitution addresses all of that, even the possibility of an electoral college tie (congress decides).  Our system has problems, and those need to be addressed; but when people participate, it works.