To The Polls

If you’re looking for a typical election day post, click here.

Indulge me for a minute.

I’ve been using this image from Election Day, a 2016 Ms. Marvel issue where the signature character uses not her super powers, but her Jersey City communities’ love for her to stop a Hydra plan to take over the local city council. She doesn’t just beat down the baddies, but leads a progressive coalition to the polls and Hydra is defeated.

It’s not hard to figure out what Marvel expected to happen in the 2016 election, and just like what happened in the real world, things got DARK in a hurry. Jersey City became a surveillance state focused on harassing the Muslim community. Ms. Marvel herself got doxxed and stalked, a particularly powerful story-line for a Muslim-American teenage girl in an era where Islamophobia was an unofficial administration policy in the actual United States.

It was a far cry from eating cookies with Squirrel Girl.

I bring this comic book up for two reasons.

First Lesson: Voting Can Help Stop the Backslide

First, while Ms. Marvel’s story isn’t real, it reflects what America’s youth and young adults have grown up with. A voter eligible to cast their first vote today was eight when Donald Trump was elected president, and has grown up in a world that’s been defined by a government that’s been taking us backward on, well, just about everything. Even when he was out-of-office for four years, his presence was still felt just about everywhere.

It is unreal to me what a massive failure my generation has been.

We’re leaving the next generation a world that is more polluted and experiencing a once-avoidable climate disaster. There are powerful forces in the country dividing us along issues of race, culture and religion; aided and abetted by a group of oligarchs that have bought mainstream media outlets and social media. In 2016 could we imagine 60 Minutes turning into a force for MAGA propaganda or Twitter becoming a trillionaire’s playground?

The past two years have also seen an acceleration in the war on America’s non-white communities. The racist dog-whistles of the 2024 campaign have led to the administration sending armed thugs in to harass, kidnap, jail and deport non-white communities in the name of “immigration enforcement.” There are surely people that believe that these communities deserve this treatment, and that ICE will help return America to when it was “Great Again.” But poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans reject these values.

But polls are only as good as the paper they’re printed on if we don’t vote. Every election provides a chance to make things a little better. No, a mid-term change in congress won’t lead to major improvements in people’s day-to-day lives on its own, but it should slow the weakening of the country and government. For today, that has to be enough.

So yes, vote for Measure RTM and against Prop. 45 and follow all the other Streetsblog endorsements. Providing safe and clean transportation options is important. Stopping the gutting of CEQA is important; these things are important. But also make sure you’re voting for those kids and young adults. Every vote to slow the backslide gives them a better chance to course correct from the colossal electoral mistakes we’ve made in the last couple of years.

And while every vote has equal value, we must also acknowledge that not every vote requires equal effort. Here in California, my wife’s ballot arrived in the mail, and was dropped off in a dropbox within a week. For whatever reason, my ballot didn’t arrive. But a short trip to a local voting center, done around my timeline on a random day last week, and my vote was counted. The real-life versions of the voters Ms. Marvel rallied are the same ones that have to work extra-hard just to vote.

In other states, we’ve seen images and video of black and brown voters waiting for hours to vote. And this isn’t an accident, the stories of early-voting and mail-in voting being curtailed are becoming commonplace. And of course, some states are targeting voting centers (early- and day of-) for closures in precincts with majority non-white voters. Even in California, there are measures on the ballot that will make it harder for people to vote should they pass.

Second Lesson: Voting Isn’t the End

But there’s a second lesson from Ms. Marvel’s story. She won the election, but the fight wasn’t over. Hydra lost the election, but still took over the government through bribery and a Jersey City populace that thought they already won. Maybe the writers would have taken the story in a different direction if the real-world election had a different outcome.

So tomorrow, or next week, or whenever we know the results, know that the fight isn’t over. New elected officials don’t guarantee new outcomes. After election day, it’s time to go back to work to try and make sure our elected leaders, old and new, govern the way they told us they would.