It was an election, not Armageddon
Our elected officials have offices, not superpowers. We must both help them and hold them accountable for them to accomplish the things they promised.
Note: This piece was written the day before the election. Tense has been changed in a few places to reflect that it is being published after the election.
Calling this a big week for American democracy is like calling the Super Bowl a little ballgame. We wrote this on the day before the election while hundreds, if not thousands, of candidates nationwide made their final pitches for the favor of more than 240 million eligible voters. Those voters’ impact on America’s economics, policy, and climate (literal and figurative) are immense and will have long-lasting, global impacts.
But that’s election week. What about tomorrow?
After too many months of buildup, excitement, drama, and dread, the campaign season is ending. Next, despite each campaign’s claims about the end of America, is not the apocalypse. It’s just tomorrow, which is a lot like today, but mercifully lacking in campaign ads.
Whether your favorite candidate wins or loses, most of today’s problems and opportunities will still be there tomorrow. A Harris victory wouldn’t have, by itself, restored Roe v. Wade or reined in monopolies. Trump’s victory will not, by itself, create a police state or purge the country of immigrants. And neither candidate’s victory would restore Iowa’s school budgets, clean our water, provide rural health care, or keep our rural counties from losing population.
Each of those issues is a big issue, but together they are still only the tip of our iceberg of unsolved problems. And, no matter how gifted any candidates are, they are still just people with limited time, energy, and authority. Expecting otherwise is a recipe for disappointment, one seen too often in disenchanted voters who say some version of, “I voted my person in. Why didn’t they fix things?” But “we the people” give our elected officials offices, not superpowers.
It turns out that the work of making a more perfect union is never done. While we believe that our representatives generally make good faith efforts to do what they said they would, they still need us, their constituents, to remind them how their action (or inaction) affects us and to hold them accountable. If the person you voted for wins, you should have someone you can negotiate with. If not, remember the lesson that Iowan advocates have learned over the last years: even when you can’t stop bad ideas, you can often make them less bad.
In other words, to paraphrase the League of Women Voters: if you want it to succeed, democracy is not a spectator sport.
So take a little of the energy you committed to campaign season and decide on a change you want to see in the world. Join a group that supports that change or start one of your own. It could be a club, a cause, or even a union. Working together, not electing saviors, is how things get done in democracies. Groups not only make our voices louder; they also help us share the work, keep on task, and sometimes even find our friends. And, in this time of political realignment, you might be surprised to find out who those friends are.
The election was a spectacular group effort, but we and all of our friends are still needed. Making changes in America usually requires not just the right people in office but the rest of us holding them to their promises. From too-big-to-fail corporations to healthcare to immigration to school closings, hard problems are, well, hard. To get them over the finish line, our superpower-free politicians need us to cheer them on and to hold them to task. When we don’t do that, we get things like Guantanamo Bay and Remain in Mexico instead of immigration reform. Those broken promises are on our elected officials, but they are on us, too.
So today, hold our all-too-human leaders to account and revel in the absence of political ads.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa.
Originally published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on November 9, 2024.
Trump and MAGA have been notably 'effective' in keeping Democrats on defensive, i.e., holding Democrats accountable—albeit through a blend of misinformation, media manipulation, and entertainment-driven narratives—all while Democrats and anti-MAGA voices have struggled to deliver counterpunches with comparable impact. What’s missing from the anti-MAGA or Democratic playbook is a similar approach to keeping red-state leaders accountable to their constituents.
Fantastic assessment of event and its aftermath. For the losing side there is disappointment, but despair is never the way; for the winning side, excitement of course, but his bite will never match his bark. And remember, every two years we get to again weigh in again on how things are going--one ingenious feature of an incredible document. We have done it 118 times and will do so again. Now, let's celebrate the first blessing of November 5th--no more political texts on our phones!