Carson On California: Even in California, your vote on Tuesday matters


It feels as if a wave of civic engagement has swept across the country. Election day is still a day away and more than 90 million Americans have already voted. Those voters represent almost 43% of registered voters nationwide and a pair of states — Hawaii and Texas — have already exceeded their total vote counts from 2016. 

Californians appear to have been bitten by the same voting bug. Approximately 40% of California’s electorate has already voted, and experts say that the state is on track to shatter its previous total voting record. For fans of democracy, which I hope includes every American, this is incredible! However, the levels of turnout seen in California also beg the question: In what is one of the most reliably blue states in the union, how much does one’s vote actually matter?

The answer is plain and simple. In California, your vote matters a lot. In fact, it could be argued — and it will be argued by yours truly — that a vote in California has the potential to impact more Americans and engender more change than a vote in any other state. However, before we delve into my raving, California-nationalist take on the power of a Golden State ballot, the elephant in the room must be discussed: presidential elections. 

When people say that their vote for president doesn’t really matter in California, they’re not entirely wrong. If you’re voting for the Democratic presidential candidate, you’re just piling onto what is already California’s sizable, perennial blue majority. On the other hand, if your political inclinations lean right, voting for the Republican presidential candidate amounts to a masochist exercise in political self-flagellation. 

Facts and data bare out the same story. The New York Times’ columnist Farhad Manjoo recently noted in his own column that in 2016, a combined 80,000 vote margin in favor of Donald Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania superseded the more than 4 million vote margin Hillary Clinton received in California. Clearly, these figures illustrate a fundamentally undemocratic feature of our electoral system, but the ramifications are not only felt there. 

According to the same column, fracking was mentioned 10 times during the 2020 Vice Presidential Debate. That makes sense, considering how important the issue is toward securing that aforementioned, sacred midwestern majority, but what about California? What about the largest state in the country, where wildfires have wreaked havoc on hundreds of thousands of Americans for months now? What about housing and homelessness, the two issues that many in the state consider to be of the highest importance? 

Well, when it comes to those questions, the answers were virtually nonexistent. Wildfires only received a glancing mention, and it was by the debate’s moderator, Susan Page. Neither housing nor homelessness were even mentioned. This all becomes even more infuriating in light of the fact that Kamala Harris is California’s god-damn Senator and not even she felt compelled to address the crises facing her state in light of the marginal incentives for doing so. 

This is a big, big problem. It strikes at the core of our representative democracy. No voter, regardless of their state, should feel like their vote is an afterthought and no vote should be an afterthought. This is not to invalidate the real and pressing issues facing Americans in other parts of the country. What happens to the people of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is no less important than what happens to the people of California, but they should be no more important either. But the value placed on a certain segment of voters in this country has become so disproportionate that the concerns of a select few states have become the altar upon which our political parties place nearly their entire collective fortunes on, and this is deeply troubling. 

Voters in California should be mad about this. It is wrong. It challenges the notion that we are a functioning democracy. However, Californians must not let the failings of our federal election system distract them from the power their vote truly holds. 

In California, voters will decide the fate of affirmative action programs within the most comprehensive and advanced postsecondary educational system in the world: the University of California system. They will decide whether or not to restore parolees’ rights to vote and whether or not to extend the franchise to allow 17 year olds to vote in primary elections. They will decide whether or not 2018’s blue wave will be sustained in pivotal swing districts across the state and whether or not the country’s largest prosecutorial office and the world’s largest prison system will be subject to changes by a new progressive prosecutor. The future of the gig economy, and the tens of millions of people it employs, is on the ballot as well. 

By no means should Californians discount the Presidential election. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of our country and our world  will be determined by it. However, as Californians head to voting centers at record pace to cast their ballots this year, they must remember that not only does the soul of our nation hang in the balance, but so does the fate of California and the 39.5 million Americans that call it home, as well. 

Stuart Carson is a senior writing about California politics. He is also one of the deputy diversity & inclusion directors for the Daily Trojan. His column, “Carson on California,” runs every other Monday.