I have not voted since the Obama era.
That is not something I tell people because I think everyone else should do the same. Voting is their decision.
It is simply where I landed.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that the biggest problems in a country this large could be solved by treating every presidential election like the final battle between good and evil.
The federal legislative branch has 535 voting members trying to represent a country of hundreds of millions of people. The House has 435 voting representatives; the Senate has 100 senators.
That system can make national law. What it cannot do is make every American community culturally identical.
California is not Georgia. New York is not Idaho. Oakdale is not San Francisco.
And I think pretending that “United States” means everyone thinks, lives and prioritizes things the same way is one of the biggest mistakes we make when talking about politics.
We are united under a constitutional system. That does not mean we are one giant neighborhood.
My own interest has shifted away from presidential theater and toward a much simpler question:
Sometimes that is Congress. Sometimes it is a state agency. Sometimes it is a county. Sometimes it is City Hall. And sometimes the government has nothing to do with the problem at all.
I would rather understand the machinery than worship the people operating it.