I’m in Philadelphia visiting my sister as I write this. I arrived yesterday, the same day that disgraced former president and super-felon Donald Trump made a campaign appearance at a McDonald’s franchise in order to make French fries. He apparently had a great time at his play-pretend job. How nice for him.
Trump’s love of McDonald’s is widely known. He claims to love everything on the menu. As for the people who actually work at McDonald’s and barely make enough to scrape by, well, he doesn’t care about them one bit. But who knows, maybe after his highly staged “shift” he’ll become a believer in paying the people who make the food he loves so much enough to pay rent. I’m not going to hold my breath, though.
Trump’s McDonald’s stint was in response to Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that she worked at McDonald’s when she was in school. Trump says she’s lying. And yet there’s a photo of Trump and McDonald’s employees from his minutes on the job standing in front of a poster that reads “1 in 8 Americans have worked at McDonald’s.” In other words, a lot of people have worked for McDonald’s. But Trump lies about everything, so I guess he just assumes everyone else is lying, too.
The election is so close, and not just because it happens very soon, but also because polls show Trump and Harris in a statistical Electoral College tie.
But I learned my lesson in 2016: Being obsessed with polls, especially when they are this close, is not helpful and not particularly informative. I never took a statistics class, but I know enough to not celebrate or panic every time Harris is up or down a point.
Still, it’s a lot to bear. There is so much at stake in this election. And I know, that’s what is said about every election. But this one could literally make or break the United States.
As far as countries go, we’re babies. The United States just hasn’t been around that long compared to so much of the rest of the world. Democracy is not self-sustaining. It takes work. And, sadly, an awful lot of Americans are taking it for granted.
But while the presidency is very important, it’s not the only thing on your ballot. There are important elections happening at all levels of government. Who sits on your state’s Supreme Court, who makes up your local school board, who will represent you at the city, county, and state levels.
As the saying goes: “The further down the ballot, the closer to your door.”
This is something “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner and podcast host Monét X Change doesn’t want you to forget.
Monét tells The Advocate that local races are “the people who are in charge of your streets, who are in charge of allocating the funds to get better lighting, or the things that you encounter more on a daily basis.”
“It’s the local elections that are informing these decisions for you,” she continues. “It’s so easy to just think of the big picture because we’re so inundated with senators and congresspeople and the presidency. But your alderman is so important, your council person is so important….These people are informing the things that you really deal with every day, and activating your one vote to affect change locally is just as important as the big ticket items like senators, representatives and the president.”
Unfortunately, these are the races that tend to get lost in the shuffle. The ones that some voters encounter for the first time at the polls and either leave blank or just take a wild guess. I urge you to not leave these races to chance. You do not want your city to be run by a council hellbent on banning LGBTQ+ books in your local library. You want your council to be run by competent people with basic human decency who can make sure your trash is picked up on time and your public parks are safe. Incompetence at the local level can truly mess up your day-to-day life.
Voting can seem like an abstract exercise, but it’s really not. This is especially true for young voters who historically don’t vote in huge numbers.
Millennials and Gen Z “are gonna be the biggest voting blocks in this election and the ones to come,” Monét tells The Advocate. “I think it’s so easy to feel maligned and to feel like you exist in this space where your one vote doesn’t matter, but a bigger lie has never been told. Your one vote is so goddamn important, especially when we mobilize and use all of our one votes together. We can affect a lot of changes.”
Can I get an Amen?