Voting in a Crumbling Democracy
I'm not an apathetic voter, I'm just jaded.
Welcome to my Substack #17. Soundtrack for this post: Focus on the Midterms
1. Vote, today.
2. Vote, even though I’m not sure that I believe in the voting process anymore. I used to think it was a fact, but it’s now a belief, yes – like Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy. Like this system that we all pretend to hold up. The tooth fairy only works as long as we keep up the pretense of lies and we all hold this lie up together. It’s a collective fantasy social contract. The law, the constitution, the government – they only have power if we as a society give them power. Whereas before it used to feel like we were battling simple voter suppression or bold racism, it feels like now we are battling magnanimous cultural gaslighting funded by capitalism overlords and manipulated by Russians bots who are wanting the fall of America.
3. This might be the first election where I am not actually IN IT – I am not making phone calls, or making flyers or educating people how to vote. I have been working in the world of electoral politics for 25 years and have helped to turn out over half a million voters. I did actually spend an evening counting up that total, I think, because someone far less accomplished than me was bragging about how many voters they turned out. I counted up every voter contact in every canvass of every campaign I managed. I did not include the passive influence of earned media – of each PSA video I helped to produce, or funding that was distributed to artists to make electoral content or podcast listeners who turned out to vote. I think the real number of people who I helped to go vote is probably more like a million if not more, no hyperbole. And this year, I just don’t feel like it at all.
4. I tell people I’ve taken a step back to art, write and heal, but the secret truth is I’ve become a little jaded. To be clear, I am not a generic apathetic voter – I am a burned election practitioner. And when you are jaded by the thing that you spent your whole life making yourself an expert on, it’s kind of hard to figure out what your next step is in life.
5. The thing is, I did believe, I believed very much. In my twenties, an older uncle told me I was a progressive activist because I was a youth – and by the time adult responsibilities came around I’d be a fiscal and social conservative. It angered me then and it angers me now. I did not start working in elections for selfish vanity – I started because of power, and how people who looked Muslim had no power in 9/11’s backlash. Unlike most involved in South Asian American politics of the mid-2000s, I wasn’t interested in candidate campaigns and getting involved to have a picture with a candidate to put in a frame on my wall. I was interested in building up grassroots people power – specifically, I wanted to have a list of South Asian/Muslim/AAPI voters that I could turnout and say, “SEE our people fucking vote and voted you into office so you can’t ignore our issues anymore.”
6. My theory of change built out of my Master in Public Policy thesis was this – electoral campaigns ignore anyone who isn’t a swing voter – and that by ignoring these potential voters because it’s too hard to do the extra campaign work to engage them, that they become low-propensity voters. It’s a Catch-22 self-feeding cycle that White Supremacy doesn’t care to understand. And the media and the political parties will just ignorantly run around and call young people or BIPOC people apathetic to politics but really they aren’t invited to the process. If we just educated and resourced and motivated these low-propensity voters in-language and in culturally component ways, they will be excited to vote. Make voting accessible and create paradigm shifting cultural content to excite potential low-propensity voters and shift them into habitual voters. It is part of a multi-year long term strategy of a changing nation, not a rapid mobilization of soccer moms for “the most important election of our lives” that the Democrats seem hell bent on using as their tactic. All that the hyper-focusing on soccer moms has done is empower a generation of Karens.
7. They will tell you that every election is the most important election of your life. They will say it with earnest. They will pretend like the past elections weren’t as traumatic and that this is the first time they are saying that this is the most important election of your life. They will gaslight you into thinking that all the murders that happened before the 2004 elections, the mosque burnings before the 2008 elections, the knife attacks before the 2016 elections did not make an environment AS URGENT as this election’s urgency. All it takes is a $25 donation.
8. Studies show voters turn out because of peer pressure and FOMO. Studies show that mailers don’t work but a mailer that looks governmental does. Studies show law signs don’t work but lawn signs are used by campaigns to measure community interest. Studies show that voters need at least three reminders to vote to remember it as one. The study I was involved in 2008 shows that reaching out to low propensity voters with phone bankers in their language and of their ethnicity means they will engage in a conversation and turn out to vote. Studies show culturally competence makes a difference for BIPOC voters. Studies show that simply asking makes a difference to people who had never been asked before. Studies show that a trusted messenger – like a well-known uncle recording a video on whatsapp and sending it out to people - is very effective. Studies show that some people just don’t vote because they don’t know how or where, so in that case hotlines, how-to videos, and reminder calls with locations help. Studies show that “relational voting” or “friends asking” is a very effective strategy. Studies show that having deep conversations at the door and on the phone lasting more than 10 minutes are most effective. Studies show that when you have a teenager voice on the phone making calls, elders are less likely to hang up.
9. I was talking to Reema last week asking how she was doing, given all the election chaos. She was a few years younger and we had the same job running AAPI electoral campaigns in different cities in the late aughts. We both had started voting organizations in our twenties – hers for Muslims and mine for South Asians. We are kindred. So when she said, “It feels like the work I’ve been doing for the past twenty years doesn’t mean anything anymore” I really felt it. All the work we did – the hard core grassroots organizing we did just feels like it’s disappeared into the ethos. Not because our theory of change was “wrong” – that was very right. But the goal post shifted – and the Right is suppressing voters, storming the Capitol, dismantling the elections office from within, and disobeying redistricting laws. The truth is not truth anymore. It is a crisis of democracy which, I know, I know, is fear mongering messaging point, because yes, we’ve had all of this before. But, movement wise? The WORK we did to build up systems of change for OUR people – the all the organizations we worked for either just didn’t continue electoral work or folded all together. The non-profit industrial complex truly doesn’t value people like us.
10. The non-profit organizations where we built campaign strategies and tactics to move AAPI voters no longer runs electoral campaigns because the funding has dried up. All of those reports and data just kind of disappeared. Those lists we spent so much time developing, now all gone. The media still frames AAPIs as a “sleeping giant” of model minority voters with untapped potential, despite the endless years of tapping and our reframing of this message. The voter database tools still have terrible infrastructure for finding AAPI/Muslim/Other-Language-not-Spanish despite all our advocacy on improving these tools. People still think Desis are Republican voters despite all of the reports and data we’ve written that they are not.
11. I want to be clear, I never thought of electoral organizing as the magic bullet. Women didn’t get the right to vote till 1920 and even then, it was the 1946 Luce-Celler Act that gave South Asians citizenship and voting rights. Of course voting is a problematic system – it was founded on poll taxes and the White landowner man’s rights. The system was always rigged.
12. Last month, a younger colleague mentioned excitedly how they wanted to get into voting work because “no one had ever organized South Asians to vote before.” I was aghast, and tried politely to interpret the mansplaining. Actually, I organized South Asians to vote nationally, I just couldn’t get funding to keep it going forever, because funding doesn’t work like that. And many people have started national campaign efforts over many years. And actually, South Asian Muslims are have been doing pretty amazing at turning out voters, especially in response to the hyper-activism that happened in response to rise in islamophobia. Ok, I didn’t say all that – but we do the work, and we tell the stories of work, and we make archives of our work, and yet still, they are just reinventing the wheel and patting themselves on the back for it.
13. Did I ever tell you how I was invited to speak at a South Asian GOTV event and then 48 hours later I got disinvited from speaking at the South Asian GOTV event after a background check? It was because they found an old tweet where I said the candidate wouldn’t be supportive of the Muslim community if elected. I wasn’t wrong.
14. I can’t stop thinking about the commercial I saw last week where it highlighted the rise of Anti-Asian Hate crimes and then blamed Biden for it. It wasn’t just that it was a blatant lie – it just chronologically wouldn’t make sense. Trump was making anti-Asian rhetoric when COVID hit and that was well before Biden was elected as President. This gaslighting gambled on people’s memory of sequences of events and fed on the Asian American’s fear. And that is what makes doing election work so hard – we are fighting an incredibly funded disinformation campaign to confuse the population that tells lies. Rumor has it that PAC has $33million to spend on “Biden is anti-Asian” propaganda.
15. Studies show that this newsletter will not be effective in turning you out to vote. That this very not hopeful and not empowering messaging in this newsletter will not turn you out to vote That’s fine, because if you are reading this newsletter, you are likely a habitual voter already, a high propensity voter that cares, no matter where you are on the Jaded spectrum. You will vote and I will vote. Depending on where you live it will be an exciting race (Stacey Abrams! John Fetterman!) or less exciting races (don’t vote Caruso!). I’ll use the voter guides that friends and organizations have painstakingly assembled I’ll vote at home and drop my ballot off at a local dropbox. I wrote this newsletter because doing this work for years and years is so complex and so hard. And it does feel like we are watching the fall of democracy and I wanted to reflect on that as an electoral practitioner somehow.
16. During the pandemic, I kept going back to this hadith that The Prophet (pbuh) said - “Even if it is the last day on earth and you have in your hand a sapling to plant, plant it still.” In Joshua Tree, I painted a series of paintings to reflect this hadith and spent a lot of time reflecting on what it means for me, in a pandemic as a single childless female activist that gave 25 years to the movement. To me the sapling is voting, or more broadly, our efforts at making this world a better place. Of course, there is so much work that needs to happen to see the world change the way we need it to – but for today, vote, one sapling at a time.
Please, vote.
Hi Taz, I don't know if you remember me but we met years ago at events at Stanford. I remember being so impressed by your commitment at the time - the energy and deep faith in campaigns and politics. I was inspired by you. I am so sorry to read this: "And when you are jaded by the thing that you spent your whole life making yourself an expert on, it’s kind of hard to figure out what your next step is in life." I can relate to a loss like this - of vision, purpose, possibility. I just wanted to thank you for all you do and have done and say that I believe in you and your art and your finding your place. I wish you a fulfilling search for your now and you next and the ability to do so from places of strength and health. Lucy Bernholz