Get Out and Vote!

Lawrenceville’s most dangerous malady is apathy: as explained in our October 11 editorial, indifference spreads from student to student like a bitter, insidious disease. A Lawrentian’s most important obligation is to care—about the environment, the people and communities that raised them, as well as the world they will grow up to lead. Sometimes, this obligation proves difficult and tiresome: Making a difference for your country requires the kind of work that spans decades. This November, however, doing your part to steward America’s future is easy. Simply mail in an absentee ballot or drive to your nearest polling location. All we need to do is vote. 

Why, then, do we hear students on their way to class or sports practice wondering aloud if their vote “matters”, if the inconvenience is so small and the reward so great? Most excuses compare the individual to the majority: “New Jersey is too liberal for a single Republican vote to matter.” “Kamala Harris has a ton of supporters back home; I know she’ll win there even if I don’t vote.” “Two-thirds of the population votes: isn’t that enough already?” 

While the Electoral College promotes this mentality by handing an entire state’s electors to the popular candidate, these excuses prove to be absurd given how small a “winning margin” can be. In 2000, George Bush won Florida by a 0.009 percent margin—just 537 votes—and hence won the election. Trump won Michigan by a fifth of a percent in 2016. In 2020, President Joe Biden won Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin all within a one-percent margin., As we can see, no state is permanently “red” or “blue” and the group of coveted “swing states” shifts from year to year.  The liberal stronghold of New York was actually a swing state—backing the winning candidate, Democrat or Republican, every single cycle—until 1988. In Texas, once solidly conservative, the Democratic Senate candidate Colin Allred has closed the polling gap with his Republican opponent. However, this Senate race would never have been competitive if Democratic Texas voters threw their hands in the air. So why should you? To respect the current headwinds, though, The Lawrence reminds Lawrentians from Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada that their hometowns might decide this year’s election. Remember, the concept of a battleground state in which both candidates run a very close race would not exist if nobody believed in the power of the vote. Reversals from red to blue and back again occur when citizens are politically active enough that no faction’s preferences can fully engulf the state. 

Of course, your vote still matters if your state has a much larger (and perhaps less exciting) margin than 0.009 percent. Presidents, as powerful as they seem, get no say in how your local public schools get run, when your local roads get plowed in the winter, or whether your federal election ballot even gets certified. Your local politicians, often cloaked by obscurity, shape the most formative aspects of your daily life much more than the nuances of a federal foreign policy bill. In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson, State Legislatures gained a newfound power to restrict abortion acess to abortion for the first time in decades. That being said; your vote is more than on principle, your rights at the ballot box represent your most sacred social responsibility. We have both a right to representation and a duty to lend our own voices to the system. For most of this country’s history, suffrage was linked to qualifiers of privilege like race, gender, property, and literacy. The Voting Rights Act, which federally enforced the 15th Amendment and banned literacy tests, was only passed by President Johnson in 1965. 18-year-olds gained suffrage in 1971 because the government,which drafted 18-year-old men but precluded them from voting,was unbearably hypocritical. Generations of Americans—the shoulders upon which you stand—led the fight to build and expand our democracy. Now their baton sits in your hands; do we choose to sit out, when history tells us our power only exists when we get up and use it? 

Lawrentians, consider your purpose at this school. Yes, the ostensible reward for four years of toil might be the college and career of your dreams, but our elite education serves to propel us to lives of “high purpose,” as emblazoned on Tsai Field House’s atrium. However pretentious that phrase sounds, each of us has the potential to impact the world. Our social responsibility is only greater because of the opportunities we have so often seized. Why take a year of American History in Noyes—160 hours total of homework and classwork—if you never plan to use that information? Why develop critical thinking skills around the Harkness table, if you cannot apply them to candidate speeches and policy proposals, separating the flashy promises from the genuine core of each politician? Your high school years prepare you for a lifetime, and the skills you learn here matter just as much in your future careers as when your country entrusts its future to your judgment, as we see the results of our decisions play out on the national stage. Thus, know that you have the power to both cast a ballot and choose a candidate in an informed and cool-headed way. You decide whether to use these abilities; you can circumvent your power by silencing your voice in our government’s decisions, or you can believe in the power of yourself and others. The right is yours. Use it.