Why I'm Not Voting

I'm not voting in the 2024 presidential election, which currently makes me the least popular person in my friend group. 90% of my friends lean left and think I'm enabling Hitler, 10% lean right and insinuate I'm handing the keys to our Orwellian overlords, and everyone agrees that I'm a bad American for not exercising my right to vote.

I'm a single-issue voter. I believe our government is becoming increasingly inefficient and corrupt. This issue is upstream of all the others because if we don't fix it, nothing else matters. It doesn't matter what politicians promise us about taxes or immigration or guns or healthcare or defense if the government machine is not willing and able to actually implement those promises.

How effective is our government? No one would argue it's 0% effective. Roads get repaired, fires get put out, and when you call 911 someone usually picks up. On the other hand, no one would argue it's 100% effective either. We waste hundreds of billions on things like rural internet and high speed rails with nothing to show, ballots get lost, and there are a lot of videos showing police officers harming innocent people. Clearly room for improvement.

So, the government’s effectiveness is somewhere between 1% and 99%. Where exactly we are on that scale is a complex, subjective question. I'd ballpark it at around 50%. About half the country seems to distrust institutions, and given those institutions are supposed to serve them, I'm inclined to trust their opinion. If half the people who eat at a restaurant say it sucks, I'd probably stay away.

I assume that for every dollar I pay in taxes, half is used as expected, while the other half is wasted and/or used against me (ugh, lobbyists). My guess is that those supporting Kamala Harris think the government is around 75% effective, while Trump supporters see it closer to 25%. While there’s no precise data on this, ChatGPT's summary of some recent polls on trust in the government support my completely made up numbers.

Assuming the government is only 50% effective, how do you fix it? The first step is to examine the trend. Has government effectiveness increased or decreased over the past 20 years? I'd guess it’s getting worse by about 2% each year. People likely overestimate the decline because the internet has recently made the problem more visible, but even accounting for this, I still believe the trend is negative, just not as steep as some may assume.

If the government is declining in effectiveness, it's safe to assume doing the same thing we've been doing isn't going to fix the problem. We need new people, new parties, and new ideas. This is why I don't support Kamala Harris. We had Obama for two terms, then his VP for one, and now his VP's VP has been appointed, not elected, by the party. She's the quintessential insider, which means that if she's elected, I believe next year will be 2% worse.

Meanwhile, Trump is something relatively new. He’s not a traditional politician, he’s a former democrat turned populist. Nearly every institution has fought him — the courts, most of the media, even his own party (not to mention more than one assassin) — yet he still maintains a fervent base of supporters. He did serve a term marred by covid, but that's a lot less than the past 12 years served by Obama insiders. Plus, changing government should justify more time and patience than maintaining the status quo.

This election, Trump has become a rallying point for independently-minded politicians like Gabbard on foreign policy, RFK Jr. on regulatory capture, Ramaswamy on government, and Vance on I'm not sure but he seems like a generally intelligent guy. While I do not agree with every one of their policy positions, I admire that this ragtag bunch of many former Democrats seem to share my values and anti-establishment ethos. If Trump wins and history looks favorably on his term, I believe it'll be because he and the Republican Party became a trojan horse for previously homeless independents.

However, Trump's character is beyond concerning. He has a history of striking deals and reneging once he no longer needs the other party, not to mention cheating on the people he's supposed to care the most about. Is he Gilded Age style populist reform dressed up in wolf's clothing or is he just a wolf? I worry that if elected, he will fail to empower the politicians now supporting him. He's building a team of potentially great players but he's not a coach I trust to look out for anyone but himself.

For someone like Trump, there’s always a need for more. What's the next trophy after his final term is up? While I trust that Americans would try to prevent any attempt to hold onto power, there’s still a risk. I worry that a lot of the undecided / independent crowd is willing to overlook Trump's character because they're so fed up with the system, in part because I feel that urge too.

There’s an argument that, if someone like Trump is going to be elected, it should happen sooner rather than later, while the system is damaged but still salvageable. Are we in that sweet spot now or is it already too late? The irony among left-leaning voters is that they seem to believe our government is so fragile that Trump could co-opt it, yet they want to re-elect the people that oversaw the weakening of that same system. The irony on the right is the belief that Trump will put the people before himself.

"Not voting doesn't fix the problem!" You're absolutely right, it's doesn't. However, I've reached the point where the cost of continuing to deliberate between three bad choices - a broken machine, a selfish individual, and a few third party candidates I don't believe in - is greater than the expected impact of my vote, especially in California. If you believe in one of the candidates, please vote! I'm happy leaving this up to citizens more confident than me.

What can I do? I can stop draining my energy reading, thinking, and talking about politics. I can get involved in the next presidential race earlier and support a primary candidate I believe in. I can spend extra time playing with my baby, helping around the house, smiling at strangers, calling my friends, and if I'm in a really good mood I might even let a few cars merge when it's not their turn.

"If the other team wins, it's over!" increasingly sounds like an abdication of responsibility. Maybe if I and everyone else paid as much attention to the little things we can control as we currently let the the big things we control a hell of a lot less drain us of our energy and agency, we'd find that we can make our country a little bit better each day. It's the only thing that ever has.