You Can’t Be Serious(60)

You might be wondering, Okay, Kal, but why is Election Day still on a Tuesday? I’ll tell you. People in positions of power don’t want to lose their power. If Election Day were, say, on a weekend (or maybe even lasted for weeks as it does in states with accessible early voting), it would be a lot easier for single parents, students, and people working multiple jobs to get to the polls. That would mean candidates would have to appeal to the needs of this wider group of people. And if that happened, many of the people currently in power would lose because they don’t represent this wider group’s needs.

The thing is, the people in power don’t want to lose. So, some of them suppress the vote by—among other things—keeping Election Day on a Tuesday. As it’s always been. Since 1845. And that’s part of the reason America ranks 135 out of 178 nations in voter turnout.1



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Back at the campaign office, I told Andrea about the strange interaction with the jogger at Grinnell who thought she was ineligible to vote because she heard it on her campus. “I guess some well-meaning political volunteer out there mistakenly told her that college students can’t caucus in Iowa?” I asked. It fell to Andrea to pull back the curtain and tell me about the frustrating range of things being done to confuse and discourage young people from participating in the political process.

First, there were robocalls. Some people reported getting official-sounding phone calls telling them, “If you’re caucusing for Barack Obama, remember the date of that caucus has changed to January fourth.” (It hadn’t. There was only one caucus date: January 3.) Another batch featured a caller underscoring Obama’s middle name, Hussein, in an attempt to make the senator seem foreign.

Second, there was in-person disinformation. When the Obama campaign embarked on a strategy of encouraging college students to return to campus early from winter break at their parents’ homes in order to caucus, it was accused of “systematically trying to manipulate the Iowa caucuses with out-of-state people.” From this allegation brewed the idea that you should only caucus in Iowa if you “consider yourself Iowan” as a matter of conscience. What a totally ridiculous thing to hear. If I got pulled over after doing four shots of J?ger, my conscience might not consider me drunk, but the cops would definitely arrest me for a DUI because that’s what the law says. Considering yourself Iowan was not a real prerequisite for voting—you’re Iowan if you live there most of the year, which college students do. No matter how much J?ger they’ve had on campus.

One of Obama’s spokespeople at the time was future White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who said, “Barack Obama doesn’t believe that we should disenfranchise Iowans who meet all the requirements for caucus participation simply because they’re in college. We should be encouraging young people to participate in the political process—not looking for ways to shut them out.”

In the early primary states, witnessing this sort of loose-rumored, anonymous voter suppression felt extra shady because I was meeting increasing numbers of young people who were opening up with inspiring and heartbreaking stories of what an Obama victory would mean to them and their loved ones. A young volunteer named Stephen told me that his mom had cancer and no health insurance. He’d had to leave college to help with the bills at home and volunteered after work every day because of Obama’s health care plan. A young woman named Sonal had a brother whose student loans were so large that he was unable to make the monthly payments. She wanted to make sure Obama’s pledge to double the Pell Grant came to fruition—it would be too late to help her brother, but it would help others like him who were thinking about higher education. And at a campaign stop on a snowy college campus, I was approached by a smiling, heavyset, wheelchair-bound young man named Miguel. After making small talk, Miguel reached into his wallet and pulled out a photo of a fit, handsome marine. “That’s me,” he said. “When my convoy in Iraq was hit by an IED, I was paralyzed from the waist down. I volunteer for the Obama campaign because both parties voted to authorize that war, and Barack was against it. I never want anyone to go through what I did.”

How could anybody try to discourage people like Miguel and Sonal and Stephen from voting? The mistake I made in pondering this question was similar to how I thought about those early stereotypical auditions—by getting caught up in raw emotion. Voter suppression—whether low-level, disorganized, and anonymous (as in the case of Iowa) or codified at a deeper level (as in the case of several recent laws and rulings) is something we can and should fight. It’s not new. It’s also not usually personal, even though its impact is. Above all else, forms of voter suppression are a symptom of old-school opportunism and power. As far as why anyone would try to discourage young people from participating in the caucus, that was simple: Polling suggested that if college students—like the woman who jogged by me—showed up, they were going to caucus for Obama.



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My phone rang two weeks before the caucuses. A well-known, left-leaning Hollywood producer was on the line. “Kal, I’ve been getting lots of calls from people who are starting to like Obama and considering donating to him. Since you know him, I wanted to bring up a big concern we have. If he ends up winning… is Barack going to nominate all Black people to his Cabinet?”

“God, I hope so,” I shot back, thinking his question was satirical.