By Fallon Head | Web Editor
For the past ten years, the non-stop bombardment from political leaders stating things like “Vote for me in this election and you’ll never have to vote again” or “This is the most important election in your lifetime” and similar phrases every election cycle creates a flow of anxiety, stress and the mindset that there’s so little to do.
However, every election can’t be the most important ever.
Let me be clear, our democracy is in a contentious point in history and that built up through the past ten years. It’s important to make the time to go vote, but the reason voting works is because it’s consistent.
Democracy runs on consistency, and consistency is boring. The constant scramble for low attention spans, funding and power make it so stress seems like the best way to get people involved. Stress and fear gets people’s attention, but it doesn’t result in any real effort, but instead dismissals or blind action.
Yes, pressure from the large political ideation gap is growing and the debates are becoming more brutal, but the reasons elections are important are because they provide a straightforward way for the average American to get involved and have a say politically.
There’s always more to be done. From research to volunteering and protesting, there’s ways to get involved beyond elections. But elections provide one day every couple years that call Americans to participate in who leads our country directly.
In the 2024 General Election, President Donald Trump told his supporters to vote this one election in order to never have to vote again. This race, Democrats are pushing their fundraising goals by declaring this election the most important of our lifetime, the same phrasing they used in the 2024 election cycle. According to PBS in 2024, about 3 in 4 adults in the U.S. said the election would determine the state of our democracy.
This election cycle, fundraising emails and political campaigns are continuing these phrases, with the added sentiments of fighting for the soul of Texas or the stability of the country as a whole.
The idea of one election being able to make or break our system is pushed to try and bridge turnout gaps, like in 2022 where only 52.2% of American citizens voted in the U.S. congressional elections.
But instead, it’s creating a false narrative around one single election. Come the next election, people might not want to show up.
But every election can’t be the most important election of our lives, because that builds on the idea that voting is something you do once or not at all. Elections are one of the most important things to our democracy, so we need to show up regardless of who’s on the ballot and whether or not they’d be our first pick.
“The most important” has connotations of a lack of importance previously, and after, this election. It doesn’t actually tell us what is being decided or where to find out the information needed to learn that ourselves.
The only way to know which election is “the most important” of our lives is to reflect years down the line. Everything that happens in our system is a slow build up. It’s not flashy, it’s not quick and it won’t be clear which election is the one that will make or break our country until after it’s over.
