Alisher Aminov
Doing independent research to pick candidates representing your ideals and beliefs can be challenging; nevertheless, choosing which candidates to vote for should not be a matter of doing what your “friend who likes politics” tells you.
The fact is, most Americans have little faith in their government. According to a May 2022 statistic from the Pew Research Center, just 2 in 10 say they believe the government does what’s right most of the time.
With so many Americans actively distrusting the government, why do people conduct so little independent research before making their choices and casting their votes at the polls?
Who is really to blame for the current state of our government when millions of Americans vote each year for candidates they know virtually nothing about?
Outside of continuous complaints about specific career politicians such as Mitch McConnel, Nancy Pelosi, Kevin Mccarthy, Chuck Schumer, etc., just 37% of Americans can name their local U.S. Representative even though we hold elections for these positions every two years.
Often, instead of conducting independent research before going to the polls, many Americans choose to either vote strictly along party lines or make their selections based on what their “friend who likes politics” tell them.
Interestingly enough, people who vote along party lines rarely seem satisfied even when their political party gains control of every national branch of government.
How can the minority party be so effective at blocking things when they lose control yet so ineffective at getting things done when they win?
Why is it that a society such as ours, with one of the most advanced consumeristic cultures on the planet – where people spend hours researching the minute details of the next headphones they want – consistently fails to conduct the most basic research into the political candidates we elect lead?
To make matters worse, people have begun to follow the trend of being “single-issue voters,” essentially supporting a candidate that may differ from them on all other issues because of a single compatible stance they agree with.
As a result of this narrow-minded thinking, millions of people across the nation either continue to elect or newly elect political leaders that they know virtually nothing about simply because of the notion that they share some ambiguous united cause.
Most Americans would not allow their neighbors to order dinner for them at an unfamiliar restaurant without knowing their tastes. Yet, today, millions across the United States of America allow people around them to dictate who they vote for to lead the highest offices in our land.
Would you trust a doctor who told you fast food was healthy if you knew he or she made millions of dollars from the fast-food industry? If not, why would you trust political commentators who make millions of dollars by telling you who to vote for?
How can the American people blame their government, which has been designed according to their votes, for operating in an untrustworthy way when they do so little to educate themselves before going to the polls? Who really is to blame?
How can we complain that Congressional Representatives are too old or too corrupt when we hold House elections every two years? Why do we continue to vote them in?
At what point as a collective society must we take responsibility for our own actions and strive to do better instead of simply adding on to a mountain of empty complaints?
While it is easy to blame Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for everything we are currently dissatisfied with, at what point do we focus our attention on the other 434 House seats, 100 Senate seats, and tens of thousands of other state and local offices that affect our lives every day?
Author: Amaury Abreu
