It is morning on the eastern coast of the United States of America on Election Day in the year 2020. Over 100 million Americans have already submitted their ballot to their local officials, and the media estimates over 150 million Americans will cast their votes before the day is complete. With roughly 255 million eligible voters spread throughout the country, the participation of 150 million voters would give this election a participation rate of roughly 58%, making it the highest turnout since the election between former Vice-President Richard Nixon (R) and incumbent Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (D) in the tumultuous year of 1968.
I am one of the 100 million Americans who voted early this election, having mailed my Vermont ballot to my town clerk early last week. My wife plans on voting in person later this afternoon. I decided to vote early because, as a teacher of dozens of students whose families are doing who knows what in terms of protecting themselves from the coronavirus, I run the risk of having been exposed, and I want to limit any potential exposure that our polling-station volunteers (virtually all of whom are elderly) have to face today. My wife, on the other hand, feels it is symbolically important for her to cast her vote in person, and I respect her decision.
As a resident of solid-blue Vermont, the outcome of our votes in the Electoral College is as close to a foregone conclusion as one can have in our messy democracy. I fully expect (as does everyone else) that former Vice-President Joe Biden will receive our state’s three electoral votes. If you read this blog on the regular, you won’t be surprised to learn I cast my vote to help make the pundits’ prediction a reality.
While I put my mark next to their names, I was not voting for former Vice-President Biden and Senator Harris. I suspect former V.P. Biden will make a passable president and Senator Harris will make a serviceable vice president (in that she will continue to have a pulse and she will break in the direction I favor if there are tie votes in the Senate), but if I had my druthers, I would have voted for Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, the two Democratic candidates I most favored in the primaries.
Instead of voting for the Democratic nominees, however, I voted against giving President Trump and Vice-President Pence another four years of power. Some of my Republican-leaning friends have argued against this particular stance, asking for me (and others who feel like me) to defend our votes without referencing the Republican incumbents, but I don’t accept their premise.
It’s just as important to keep the wrong people out of power as it is to put the right people into power.
Our country has shown that, for the most part, its democracy can survive corrupt politicians, white supremacists, serial sexual assaulters, paranoid and insecure old men, connections to organized crime, and even secession, and I have complete faith that former Vice-President Biden’s administration of the executive branch will be just as palatable as virtually any other of the non-great men who have held the title of President over the office’s 231 years of history.
But I have serious doubts that it will survive the reëlection of President Trump. The most pressing concern is the Trump Administration’s response to the coronavirus. In September, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote that “through his actions and inactions, this callous, self-absorbed president and his administration are responsible—by standard statistical measures—for well over half of all US coronavirus deaths.” In other words, over 111,000 Americans are dead today because Donald J. Trump is the overseer of the executive branch of the United States government.
The second most pressing concern is this administration’s denial of the existential threat that is human-caused climate change. Policies enacted by President Trump and his partners in the Republican party have, as one scientist put it, locked in “permanent, irreversible damage to our environment[, and] once we go beyond key tipping points…there is no going back.”
This administration’s weakening of fuel-efficiency standards, removal of national coal-power regulations, opening of gas and oil drilling on federal lands and offshore, support of oil pipelines in protected areas, withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, loosening of restrictions on methane emissions, refusal to send the Kigali Agreement to the Senate for ratification, and so much more, threatens to destroy the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans over the next several decades, not to mention the national security of the United States (see Sec. 335 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018).
To President Trump’s coronavirus response and tragic stance on environmental regulations, we must also add his rhetorical and legal challenges to the country’s democratic institutions, including his incitement of violence against members of the free press, his repeated calls for the extrajudicial incarceration of his political opponents, his flirtation with ignoring the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, his refusal to address the racism inherent in so many of the nation’s systems, his tacit and not-so-tacit support of violent white supremacists, his recruitment website to organize illegal militias (a Trump Army) to secure the integrity of the voting process (rather than trusting state and local governments to do it), his repeated calls for his subordinates to make a loyalty oath to him and to uphold that oath rather than the one they made to the Constitution, and so much more.
I fully believe — and all evidence supports the belief — that President Trump is dangerous.
While I might not be a full-throated supporter of the Biden/Harris ticket, I am a full-throated opponent of four more years of President Trump.
If you are one of the 50+ million Americans who have not yet cast your ballot today, I beg of you: please vote for anyone other than President Trump.