Why not going to the polls could be a good thing

By Ed Goldman

Starting in 2022, the great American tradition of trying to find your polling place—is it that Episcopalian church around the corner, the Henderson family’s garage a few blocks away or that elementary school named for British-born American cigar maker Samuel Gompers, whose impact on the nation’s history cannot be overstated?—will disappear in California, also known as The Initiative State.

All voting will now be done by mail, guaranteeing that statewide, regional and local election results will be available shortly after you’re reincarnated.

I used to think I’d miss the experience of popping over to my neighborhood polling place on Election Day. But a single, fatal disease changed all that for me. No, not COVID-19. Donald Trump.

Before Trump’s reign of error, you could look forward to voting day because the chats you were likely to have with fellow voters waiting to fill out their ballots were far less likely to make your blood pressure achieve numbers akin to the national debt.

Now, I recognize that under California election law, Section 3018, we’re not allowed to “electioneer” at the polls. Since that’s a pretty silly word— reminiscent of Walt Disney’s “Imagineers” (the stupendously creative team he and his company assembled) and “Mouseketeers” (the stupifying team of kids he and his company assembled), here’s how the website usa.gov defines it:

“Electioneering means the visible display or audible dissemination of information that advocates for or against any candidate or measure on the ballot within 100 feet of a polling place, a vote center, an elections official’s office, or a satellite location.”

Not mentioned, natch, are the parking lot of that Episcopalian church, the curb outside the Henderson family’s garage or the tot-lot at the elementary school named for Samuel Gompers. Many a political discourse has been conducted on monkey bars and swings.

But the arguments, such as they were, simmered on “low.” They rarely achieved microwave-nuclear status. The only reported injuries involved middle-aged guys who, after venting their editorial spleens, thought they could still execute handstands on the monkey bars or 360-degree spins on playground swings.

To summarize, political palaver seemed a lot friendlier pre-Trump. So did politicians and voters. It was almost as if most of us felt that this was simply an election, not a call to arms, that if our candidate won, he or she did it fairly and squarely—and if he or she lost, a nefarious plot concocted by Godless baby eaters wasn’t to blame.

When I was a kid, I watched how my parents reacted, four years apart, to Adlai Stevenson’s losing the Presidential election to Dwight Eisenhower. They were disappointed but not scared that Ike was going to lead the country into a reboot of The Great Depression or World War III.

I felt the same way when Ronald Reagan beat the trousers off President Jimmy Carter and then, in the following election, former Vice President Walter Mondale, both of whom I’d voted for. While I was no fan of Reagan’s politics, I didn’t think he had an ounce of personal evil in his Tampico, Illinois bones. In fact, I still regard with some amazement that his administration remains one of the most corrupt in U.S. history (Trump subsequently took those top dishonors, with Warren G. Harding finishing a close second, according to members of the cottage-cheesy industry which studies this sort of thing).

I shouldn’t blame only Trump for this conversational climate change. Preceding his ascendancy to the allegedly highest office in the land, we had the phenomena of “Duck Dynasty,” an immensely popular cable-TV show that focused on family values and both genetic and learned stupidity. The emotional divide between liberals and conservatives, a fracture brought on by leaders and members of both parties, had widened exponentially, and rational dialogue apparently decided to decamp for other lands or galaxies. In some way, we became separate branches of the Frankenstein family, abetting in the creation of one of this century’s most cleverly opportunistic but startlingly dumb monsters.