The Gift of Political Ads (No, Really!)
Tomorrow, we will take to the polls. It is our civic duty, our right, and — let’s be honest — our golden ticket to a very specific kind of relief.
Because in 24 hours, we receive a grand gift: the return of pure, unfiltered holiday commercialism.
Target and Best Buy will reclaim our feeds. Ads pitching air fryers and cozy sweaters will replace the endless barrage of political smear spots. Most of us will welcome the shift like a breath of crisp, cool autumn air.
But beneath the vitriol, the noise, and the eye-watering ad spends, there is a quiet truth about our shared humanity hiding in plain sight. Beyond the binary red-and-blue maps or artificial urban-versus-rural divides, we are all driven by the exact same two fundamental motivators when we fill out a ballot.
We vote because of an injustice. And we vote because we are afraid.
1. What’s Your Injustice?
Deep in our souls, most of us vote because we believe something in our society is fundamentally broken — and that by casting our vote, we might help set it right. We carry a crusade that feels, to us, entirely holy.
I grew up in a house with only one bumper sticker on the family car. I guess it was the 1990s version of the “We believe” yard signs that line our neighborhoods today. Only for my family, everything revolved around a single question: Which candidate will give voice to the unborn?
That singular focus wasn’t an abstract political theory; it was born directly from a family member’s lived experience. A member of our family felt deeply lied to by a medical system and failed by a government during a vulnerable moment in her life. For her, that injustice defined every Saturday rally, every donation, and every ballot.
Today, another woman central to my life is motivated by an entirely different injustice.
Having experienced overt sexual harassment in the workplace, her frame of reference is shaped by body autonomy and personal safety. When political figures brag on camera about assaulting women, or when the justice system hands down stiffer sentences for drug charges than for rape convictions, it isn’t abstract news to her. It is a raw, daily reminder of past violations. When headlines report stories of a young man announcing that his female friend is unconscious and available, and some respond by taking advantage of the woman but none respond by protecting the woman, it reinforces a scary reality: she never fully knows if the environment around her is safe.
One votes to protect the defenseless. Another votes to protect the vulnerable.
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Both are driven by a deep, visceral need to correct a wrong. We vote because we want to make someone safer.
2. What Are You Afraid Of?
The second driver is simpler, older, and far more powerful: we are afraid.
You don’t have to look far to see it. Ten minutes of a college football game or a quick glance at your text messages will show an electorate vibrating with anxiety.
Many voters are terrified of economic collapse — afraid that shifting away from traditional free-market capitalism toward socialized services will strip away their security and hard-earned freedom. A fear of taxation is deeply rooted in our American psyche. Ken Burns’s The American Revolution highlighted that it was not the actual financial burden of Great Britain’s taxes, but the slippery slope they represented, that motivated our Founding Fathers to declare independence 250 years ago. I hear similar intonations in how my own father talks about socialized healthcare today.
If I’m honest, I have my own deep fears. I worry about the fragility of our democracy itself. I worry about whether the checks and balances our founders built can withstand modern self-interest. I’m afraid my children will one day study American civics not as a living reality, but as a piece of historical fiction. I am concerned that we passed the point-of-no-return about three exits ago.
I can hear my father scoffing at my anxieties in the same way I might roll my eyes at his decision to cross the border from Illinois to Indiana in order to flee higher taxes. But the underlying emotion is identical. We are both looking at the horizon, terrified of losing what we hold dear.
Asking Better Questions
As the election ends and we head toward holiday tables — where we will all inevitably try to navigate (or skillfully dodge) political discussions with those we love — it helps to remember this:
We are all afraid. And we are all, in our own convoluted ways, trying to make the world a safer place.
We might have radically different ideas about how to build a just economy or protect human dignity. But if we want to live in a society where we actually love our neighbors rather than view them as adversaries, we have to change the questions we ask each other.
Instead of asking “How could you vote for them?”, what if we started asking:
- “What’s your injustice?”
- “What are you afraid of losing?”
If we can have ears that hear the heart behind the answer, we might just find the eyes to see each other clearly again. And maybe — just maybe — that’s where real solutions actually begin.
