By: Todd Kleismit, Leadership Ohio Board Member
What is our civic responsibility? It is a question I would never have pondered as a young man growing up near Dayton and cannot recall anyone ever positing such a question. Well, let’s start asking this question of each other – starting today.
Election 2020 will be my ninth presidential election as a voter. In this decidedly era of divisiveness and political polarization, leaders should strive to try to be a countermeasure to this most destructive tendency in our civic space. As for me, I have voted for five presidential candidates from one side of the aisle and three times for the candidate from the other side. I tend to be a pretty good bellwether – in reverse! In eight presidential elections, I voted for the winner just twice. My vote comes with very little ideology, which appears to be way out of step with many of my fellow citizens. While much of my social media feed is filled with messages of vitriol, finger-pointing and name calling, I’m in favor of such exciting issues as functional government, procedural democracy and democratic pluralism. The bumper sticker on the back of my car is far from inspirational, but I think is testimony to where we are as society today: Stop Fighting, Start Fixing (the mantra of the nonprofit organization No Labels).
So what is our civic responsibility? We will not all find answers in the same place. Your life experiences coming into Election 2020 are different than mine. But here is something I hope we can all see through the same lens – let’s look at this long experiment in representational democracy as a verb, not as a noun. Elections are participatory, not static. Is it enough to just vote? Only you can answer that, but it certainly is the least we can do to contribute.
If you and I are coming into Election 2020 as civic leaders, I would like to suggest that our civic responsibility is much more than voting. If you are reading this, you are a civic leader – no question about it! Rather than showing up as a partisan, why not show up as a civic leader? Consider the many voluntary options:
- Volunteering on a campaign or issue
- Contributing financially to one or more campaign
- Hosting a fundraiser for a campaign or issue
- Signing up to be a poll worker
- Be a voice of reason (and fact checker) if you’re on social media
- Run for office yourself!
I ran for office once (1993) while a college student and was elected to the local city council for a two-year term. It was a wonderful civic experience and a hopeful exercise that I would not trade for anything. I won that election by 20 votes and can’t help but wonder how my perspective would be different had I instead lost by 20 votes. What a privilege it was to serve thousands of people in local elected office! While knocking on doors in search of friendly voters one day, a fellow college student explained why he wasn’t going to bother voting. “My beer will be cold no matter who gets elected,” he said. His retort served as a sobering reminder of the apathy that leaders need to face head on.
I remember my mother once warning me about my growing involvement in politics decades ago: politics will sometimes break your heart. This is true. My heart has broken many times and I do understand why so many are cynical of politics or look at elections as nouns, awaiting the outcome as a passive participant. I get it. What is our civic responsibility to each other? Only you can truly answer this from where you stand. A former state legislator once told me that Ohio is truly run by about 10,000 people. He was talking about the political elite of mayors, state legislators, the attorney general, business leaders, chambers of commerce types, etc. He was not saying that’s the way it ought to be, but it was the way it was in his eyes. Whether that is accurate or not, Ohioans have so many options, so many choices. You don’t have to do everything, but one of the great advantages of this long experiment in participatory democracy is that we can all do something. Somewhere in your community, people have decided to step into the void and run for office to represent you at the local, state or federal level. The choice is yours to ensure that voting and elections are verbs, not nouns. Don’t be the cynic who tells that candidate or officeholder that your beer will be cold no matter who gets elected!