Peak Voting Hysteria

If you're getting too enthused about Halloween, the World Series, or any other of life's little pleasures and diversions, the Duopoly is making sure that your mind remains stuck firmly on one track and one track only: the most important elections ever in the history of humanity.

The Republicans are spreading the ridiculous message that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are rabid socialists who want to give your health care away to the "illegals" who are marching up from Honduras to invade all our homes and steal all our wonderful jobs. The Democrats tell you that unless you vote for them, or more accurately, against Trump's GOP, then democracy and liberty are doomed. Specifically, they say that "American values" are doomed. Whatever that even means. They are but the blank slates upon which to pin all your hopes and dreams of status quo maintenance.

The cell phones of America have been hijacked in a frenzied series of robocalls and text messages from candidates in dire need of both your dollars and your votes. If you thought that Donald Trump's "presidential alert" message a few weeks ago was annoying, then you were not sufficiently prepared for the Duopolistic Deluge and the ensuing logjam on your thought processes and even on your sanity.

They don't seem to realize or care that their own intrusive political campaigning is what is really invading us and making a mockery of our "values, which include our rights to privacy and peace within our own homes.

In my own congressional district (New York 19) there's some particularly vile racist campaign rhetoric coming from GOP Rep. John Faso against his Democratic challenger, Antonio Delgado. Faso is telling voters that Delgado is "not one of us" -- not because he recently moved to the district from New Jersey and immediately announced his candidacy, but because he was a rap musician before going on to Harvard, Oxford, and Wall Street. Delgado is black.

Faso's racist campaign ironically seems to be working in the favor of Delgado, who is rising in the polls and even surpassing Faso in some of them. Voters who might have been suspicious of his carpetbagging status and his employment at one of the country's biggest political lobbying law firms are now tending to support him, despite his neoliberal policy proposals. He does not, for example, favor single payer health care. merely vowing to protect Obamacare and his constituents' "access" to medical services.

To make the situation even more fraught, there are several independent and progressive candidates running who might act as "spoilers" and swing the election to Faso. So if you vote for the Green candidate, or for the actress who used to play the D.A. on "Law and Order SVU" then you will allegedly be responsible if Faso wins another term.

To which I say - B.S.! If the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had not worked so diligently to bankroll an out-of-state neoliberal to run in what used to be one of the most progressive districts in the country before gerrymandering, we would't be facing this dilemma. The upshot is that in the grand scheme of things, the corporate Democrats probably wouldn't mind so terribly if Faso were re-elected. It would give them even more impetus to virtue-signal about their diversity and the racism of the Deplorables.

A somewhat similar situation is happening in Florida, where popular progressive gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum is getting hit from both sides of the Duopoly. First, there's the racist campaign against him by Republicans. Second, there's the threat from Hillary Clinton to come to Florida, where she lost to Donald Trump, to campaign for him. As one of the most unpopular politicians in the country today, Clinton has effectively attempted to give Gillum the kiss of death.

And as reported by the Sun-Sentinel, Gillum himself has sent out nearly a million text messages to Floridians to urge them to sign up for early voting. Meanwhile, cell phone owners have been indundated by messages from his opponent, Ron de Santis, informing them that Gillum "may be" under investigation by the FBI.* Of course, you and I also "may be" under FBI investigation, but the chances of that are probably about a billion to one.

There are no specific laws which bar candidates and their operatives from harassing the citizenry - not, of course, that any such law would even be enforceable by the grossly understaffed and underfunded Federal Trade and Election Commissions. 

And good luck trying to find the source of the unwanted robocalls to demand they leave you alone. Google the number they called from, and you will be directed to myriad organizations and apps which promise to block the calls, either for a fee or for your willing relinquishment of your personal information, likely leading to even more marketing spam.

My own particular Luddite solution is never answering a call from someone I don't know, or at least blocking the number in case I do mistakenly pick up, and simply ignoring the text messages as best I can. 

Wouldn't it be something if the recipients of all this invasive messaging got so disgusted that they decided to (gasp!) sit out these midterms as a form of mass protest?

Not that such aggressive apathy will discourage the candidates in our fine, free and fair elections by any means. Because as soon as the Midterms are over, the Presidential Sweepstakes gets underway with an interminable vengeance. 

*Update: We now learn that Gillum has indeed been caught up in an FBI sting operation and apparently accepted pricey tickets to "Hamilton" on Broadway from an FBI agent posing as a property developer. So much for his flaunted progressive cred, accepting tickets to a neoliberal musical which glorifies bankers and capitalists in the spirit of "diversity." Whoever said irony is dead is crazy.