The day is Tuesday, Nov. 8 — Election Day in 2016.
On what felt like a normal afternoon, I very vividly remember my 11-year-old self asking my dad who he voted for in the presidential election. What he had revealed to me was that both he and my mother had decided not to vote. Puzzled, I chalked it up to the inconvenience that voting presented and assumed that because my parents hadn’t voted, voting wasn’t worth prioritizing. Unfortunately, my parents weren’t the only citizens who had also decided against voting in that election, and they were forced to reap the consequences.
Eight years later, I finally have the same power to vote. This time around, however, I’ll refuse to make the same mistake my parents made in 2016.
For the most part, the state my family resides in, Texas, is portrayed by the media as predominantly Republican. While this isn’t necessarily the case, the results of prior presidential elections support this assumption. Since 1976, Texas has voted red in every presidential election. That’s 48 years without seeing a “change” in voting trends. To be honest, I don’t even blame my parents for not voting in 2016. If I were voting against a 48-year trend, I too would probably assume the results had already been decided. Far too many voters are plagued by apathy, which makes it difficult to find motivation to vote against trends, if it seems there isn’t a difference being made.
The truth is, though, that Texas has the potential to break the cycle and flip from falling red in the Electoral College. Despite being the second most populated state in the country, Texas has the 6th lowest voter turnout. During the 2020 Presidential Election, Texas registered a total of 16,955,519 citizens to vote. However, only 11,315,056 of those Texans actually turned out to vote. Comparatively, in the 2016 election that my parents hadn’t participated in, Texas had amassed 15,101,087 registered voters, yet only 8,969,226 voters cast a ballot. The issue isn’t that there is a lack of Democratic voters; rather, there is a lack of motivation to end the stigma that Texas will always be a red state.
Although I will always be a Texan, one of the first decisions I made upon my arrival to campus was registering to vote in Pennsylvania. While this idea feeds into the stigma that Texans need to break, I can’t help but feel that my vote matters so much more in a swing state like Pennsylvania. One of seven battleground states, Pennsylvania has the most electoral college votes of 19. In 2020, Pennsylvania favored Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a margin of just 1.2%. However, Kamala Harris no longer has Biden’s hometown ties to Scranton, the way the Democratic Party did in 2020.
It’d be easy for students and voters alike to assume that Pennsylvania’s outcome in the 2024 presidential election would follow a similar voting trend to that of 2020. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Prior to Biden’s exit from the presidential race, Trump led Pennsylvania at 48% compared to Biden’s 44%. Since Harris’ acceptance of the presidential nomination back in August, she now leads in several key swing states, including Pennsylvania, but by very thin margins.
By no means at all is anyone’s vote “less important,” but some are far more likely to result in positive societal change. As Penn students, we are the individuals that have the power to set this change into motion. Upon opening our acceptance letters to this world-class institution, we were trusted with the responsibility of becoming informed and involved members of the Penn community and the broader city of Philadelphia. To take advantage of the critical race for democracy that is the presidential election, it is our duty to participate on Nov. 5.
While it’s easy to get lost in the festivities of trick-or-treating and Halloweekend, don’t lose sight of the responsibility we have as voters. Change is in the hands of those who put forth the effort to enact it, and that change starts with us.
ELIJAH RAMIREZ is a College first year studying political science from El Paso, TX. His email is elijah11@sas.upenn.edu.
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