Falling Behind

What can you do if you see your candidate falling behind in the polls? Sharing that you voted, is nice, but anonymous and it might not get the results you want.

As a fairly non-political person, who occasionally enjoys watching dramas about Washington DC, I am not sure that any one individual has any pull in this matter.

Collectively – we do…if we are comfortable to say specifically what we want.

For example, during the months of September and October, one of our high school teachers was in the running for a $100,000 grant to fund a project for a group of his students. Out of the 15 semi-finalists, he was tracking at 7th place…with less than a week to go. So, in order to move him up the rankings, the school, the PTO, the teachers, and the students themselves even, made a push to bring him to the top 5 as one of the winners.

Clearly the stakes of a $100,000 grant are far different than a race for an office in Washington, but it was still a grand effort by the entire school community.

That was easy. A simple share of a personal request on social media, almost anyone feels comfortable to ask family and friends to do this. In turn, it is fairly easy to have them do it, too.

When it comes to voting for a government, not everyone is ready to make a public request. Not everyone wants to share their political views – or they do – but, nothing in between.

Politics is still an overwhelmingly taboo topic, far off the list of “acceptable dinner conversation”.

Asking someone to support a senator, governor, or your personal choice for congress isn’t nearly as easy as reaching out to your followers and asking them for help…even, if it would mean keeping a candidate in the running. Or, is it?

On television and in the movies, a burst of calls to constituents results in achieving the goal, or missing it by “just that much” even when they are double digits and falling behind the leader. Those folks are paid to do that. It is their job. If they lose, they might lose their job…something that is probably easier than trying to find new friends.

~ Dawn aka Hat Girl

PS I have no knowledge of my current candidates’ status. I will be interested to see the outcome later, or tomorrow morning, however and far more sad is that we have to wait until December to see if the teacher won the grant. As dysfunctional and problematic as some of the reports from the polls were this morning, the voting process for our government doesn’t make us wait too long to find out the results…such as they are.

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