Every election is important, and there are plenty of good, normal reasons for voting tomorrow: the experiences and skills of the candidates, the competing priorities of the parties, the policy alternatives that will impact lives throughout our state, nation, and world.
But this year, of course, there’s more. Much more. These are not normal times, and this is not a normal election. The past two years have been something like a national emergency, with a President who demonstrates every single day his unfitness for office, aided and abetted by a Republican Congress that has proven utterly subservient to his whims and entirely incapable of checking his worst instincts.
The outrages come so fast and furious that it is nearly impossible to keep track of them. The shameless lies, the grotesque and provocative appeals to hatred, the rampant corruption, the dangerous assaults on health care and the environment, the sickening embrace of dictators, the juvenile name-calling, the contempt for essential norms of liberal democracy.
Tomorrow is our chance to affirm clearly what sort of country we are. If Democrats are successful, it won’t be the end of the emergency — that will come in 2020 — but it will at least restore some semblance of balance to our national life. If Democrats fall short, then the next two years will be even worse than the last two, because the election results will be seen as a validation of everything Donald Trump represents, and then the last restraints will slip off. I hate to be so starkly partisan, but that’s where we are.
Please vote tomorrow.