Black Lives Matter—and Progressives—Have Already Rocked the Vote

“It doesn’t matter how liberal young people are, since they never vote, anyway,” smirked every insufferable uncle of every college girlfriend you ever had, and statistically, you had to hand it to all of them in 2010 when everybody sat around instead of going to the polls and stopping one of the worst influxes of freshman politicians in Congress ever.

As a small-town political reporter during the rise of Barack Obama and the subsequent birth of a savage, incoherent grassroots conservative movement that turned even a harmless city council meeting I covered into a forum for local Tea Party activists to hold forth on the danger of Muslims—the subject under discussion: Recycling—it has been an enervating eight years. And it has been impotently frustrating watching so many (white, comfortable, suburbanite) people my own age blow air through their lips and roll their eyes when I tell them they should really, you know, vote.

But, like a renter who comes out of a Skyrim-binge to find that his roommates have allowed maggots to spawn in the garbage and cultures to grow on the dishes, young people finally seem to be awakening to the horror of our current political process and acting to correct it. While he may not be on track to win the nomination, progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has already influenced the rhetoric in the Democratic primary. But far more interesting to me are two down-ballot races, serendipitous in that, on the very same day, they both unseated entrenched local officials who occupy a spot on the ballot the majority of North American humans consider beneath notice: County State’s Attorney.

Cook County, Illinois State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and Cuyahoga County, Ohio State’s Attorney Tim McGinty both gained infamy over the past couple of years as public interest has risen around the deaths of unarmed black Americans at the hands of police.

Seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald of Chicago was killed, and his case buried for 400 days by Alvarez’s office as Mayor Rahm Emanuel got set for a 2015 reelection. Charges were filed in the case only after incriminating video evidence surfaced to the public. In 2014, McGinty botched an investigation following the police shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Both high-profile cases caught the public eye and stoked anger among activists, and voters in Illinois and Ohio showed both prosecutors the door this past Tuesday while most headlines screamed doom and gloom about Trump and/or Clinton.

For those on the ground who supported primary winner Kim Foxx in Chicago, it’s been a fight two years in the making. Mass incarceration moved activist groups like The People’s Lobby and Reclaim Chicago to pressure Alvarez’s office to make changes, said Kristi Sanford, communications director on behalf of the People’s Lobby.

Alvarez was criticized for too aggressively seeking jail terms for low-level drug offenses. Accusations of her covering up the specifics of McDonald’s death came after many Chicagoans had already demanded changes.

“Eventually it became clear that if we were going to change what was going on with mass incarceration in Cook County, we were going to need to issue a primary challenge,” Sanford said.

By knocking on doors and making calls and getting out the vote at the local level, Sanford said groups like the People’s Lobby can actually overcome some of the terrifying problems presented by big money. Grassroots, person to person engagement makes a stronger impression than the bleating, poorly-animated attack ads on TV.

Reclaim Chicago, a political action committee that pushed for Foxx’s election and which receives support from other political groups like National Nurses United, staged get out the vote efforts across the city and plans to keep building a base of progressive voters in the Chicago area, said political engagement director Robert Peters, who said he was feeling “the best combination of happy and exhausted” following Tuesday’s primaries.

“You’re not just running to win an election,” Peters said. “You should be running because there are so many issues happening that are affecting everybody’s lives – whether it’s the housing crisis that is destroying the suburbs or student debt that’s crippling people on the northwest side. We should try to change the political and economic environment that we’re currently in.”

This is the truth of Tuesday night: A lot of people were angry, and there were organized people ready to help get them to the polls. This, by the way, is exactly what that strawman uncle I quoted above would have sneeringly said that progressive voters and Black Lives Matter protesters would never get away from the PS4 long enough to do. And doing so is particularly important in the United States, said Matthew Sommerfeld, who has written on everything from electoral reform to inequality’s effect on political polarization at George Mason University.

“Unlike most democracies, our states, and even municipalities within each state, can create and enforce their own laws (within limits of constitutionality of course), decide how to raise and spend revenues, how to reform criminal justice issues,” Sommerfeld said. “Regular citizens also have more personal contact with the public officials charged with implementing these laws, so it has more influence on their daily lives.”

A close race – like Sanders vs. Clinton in Illinois this past Tuesday – is comparatively rare on the national level. A groundswell of support, even among two dozen of your close friends who care enough about whether the city has single-stream recycling, can change everything locally, as it may have done in 2010 when I reported on a crushing, million-dollar race for state representative where the winning candidate won by 600 votes, or in 2011 when I sat at the county clerk’s office with an earnest man who, on his third try, won a seat on the city council and defeated a mayoral appointee.

In that first race, the turnout was far lower than in 2008. Just two years earlier, that same candidate had been elected to the city council with a vanishingly slim turnout. It was his stepping stone to the Illinois General Assembly – just as the 2012 election of one U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, in which only 49.7% of eligible voters turned out, was that man’s stepping stone to a run for president.

But it isn’t all on voters, either, Sommerfeld points out, and I agree: Voter fatigue is a real problem.

“We have an unusually high number of elections and elected positions in the U.S. compared to most democracies,” Sommerfeld said. “Voters get overwhelmed by the number of times they are asked to get to the ballot box and the number of names and issues they are supposed to know. It probably makes more sense to actually have fewer elections and offices that voters participate in – and ironically, it would make our democracy more representative of the views within the electorate.”

It would seem to be asking too much of a lot of my friends and family to take the importance of voting in these smaller elections to heart. But, as we approach a general election where the choice seems to be between a candidate many in my early 30s cohort aren’t enthusiastic about and the living embodiment of the unhinged aggression that absolutely would have denied my own immigrant family entry into this country, I hope, like empowered voters in two counties last Tuesday, they’ll take it to the ballot box.