On "Pokémon GO to the Polls" and Going to the Polls

A statement of principles ahead of the 2024 United States presidential election.

Yeah, not Hillary’s finest moment.

During a campaign event in 2016, Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton quipped, “I don’t know who created Pokémon GO, but I want to figure out how to get them to have ‘Pokémon GO to the Polls’.” The joke, which sought to capitalize on the breakout popularity of Pokémon GO, was lauded by some, but for many, was derided as forced and tone-deaf.

In retrospect, the antipathy toward Clinton’s “mom joke” was probably overstated and perhaps even betrays its critics’ misogyny. My main objection to it, looking back, is that it evinces sentiments that it’s voters’ fault for not going to the polls, when ultimately, it’s the candidate’s job to get them there. Hillary’s line was uttered even before she ended up losing in then-stunning fashion to Donald Trump, but since then, she has continued to take little to no accountability for faltering in her bid for the country’s highest office with an entire party apparatus at her disposal and with an opponent in Trump who began his campaign in almost comically racist fashion, demonizing Mexican immigrants right out of the gate. It should be no wonder that, when asked about Kamala Harris’s chances this election, she responded by suggesting that Harris, first and foremost, doesn’t have “Jim Comey in the wings, waiting to kneecap her.”

The reference, for my non-American reader(s) and for those who may otherwise have forgotten, is to Comey’s unprecedented actions to influence public opinion as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when he made a statement to the press about a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee indicating that the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent” to the Bureau’s ongoing investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. Comey’s controversial break with agency protocol was a probable factor—and as some outlets would insist, a deciding factor—in the election’s outcome. Even then, the Nate Silvers of the world acknowledge it’s not the only factor, and endless postmortem dissections of Hillary’s campaign point to strategic misfires on hers and the Democratic National Committee’s parts. But sure, Hill-dawg—it’s all James Comey’s fault. Continue refusing to look yourself in the mirror.

PoGO is obviously not the cultural force it was back at its apex eight years ago, and Kamala hasn’t said anything as remotely “cringe” as “Pokémon GO to the polls” this election cycle, but once again, Trump is the head of the Republican Party presidential ticket, and once again, there is real concern that a smarter, more qualified female candidate will come up short despite their rival being a modernized version of Adolf Hitler with a fake tan and a hair transplant.

That’s right—I used the “Pokémon GO to the polls” meme to sucker you into a discussion about U.S. politics. Get rekt, Reader!

I say “get rekt” knowing full well that, merely by wading into politics amid a climate of increasing polarization and a sensationalist lack of nuance in the common discourse, I may very well get “rekt” in the form of alienating and losing one or more of the few consistent readers I have. If I were being “smart” and truly diplomatic, I would limit my content to pure PoGO commentary devoid of any apparent bias along the political spectrum, seeking to obscure or outright deny any recognition of the notion that everything is politics. At the very least, I would tell you, in a nonpartisan way, that no matter who you support, you should get out there and vote. Call it a post. Call it a day. We’re done here, ladies and gents.

I am not that smart, though, and as it concerns the 2024 United States presidential election, while there’s no perfect choice, there definitely is a wrong one: Donald J. Trump.

By now, I don’t think I should have to explain to anyone who Trump is or what he stands for, and if you know me in the slightest, you shouldn’t be surprised that I would condemn him as a political candidate. Trump isn’t the only bad Republican vying for office, and he doesn’t even represent the worst that the GOP might potentially offer in light of his incompetence. He’s not like Game of Thrones’s Night King, whose defeat would result in the disappearance of all others created in his likeness. He seems to some like an egregious perversion of conservative politics when he’s merely the logical conclusion of its design, someone who would be even more dangerous were he to be more capable.

Make no mistake, however: Donald Trump is dangerous owing to what he represents and owing to who supports him. He may deny his involvement with Project 2025 all he wants, but his denials fall flat next to the realizations that members of Trump’s campaign have had contact with Project 2025 and that the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank behind the initiative, employs individuals in Trump’s orbit.

Project 2025 is, in a word, frightening. According to a primer on the document written by Mike Wendling of BBC News, it “sets out four main policy aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation's sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.” Regarding government, Project 2025 envisions putting agencies like the Department of Justice and the FBI under control of the executive branch and eliminating the Department of Education altogether. Re abortion, the document mentions it over 200 times and proposes increased data collection on the procedure. It proposes increased funding for a southern border wall and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security as is to combine it with immigration enforcement units in other agencies, which would expand its influence and ability to deport migrants.

But wait—there’s more. It advocates for the vast reduction of federal funds devoted to renewable energy resources. Project 2025 also would seek to ban pornography, broadly permit more parental control over schools, and crack down on “woke” ideology by, among other things, putting an end to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the public sphere. It’s hard to know which part of this initiative is most disturbing, but its totality as a piece of religious fanaticism is deeply unsettling as to what it might mean for retarding or even reversing our societal progress in America. It emphasizes “freedom” and rights, but it would clearly move to abrogate the individual rights of those who aren’t moneyed white Christian males like the head of the Republican Party. When we talk about the stakes of this election, this is what we mean.

So, by denigrating a sexual predator like Donald Trump, I am thereby endorsing Kamala Harris for president, right? No, not exactly. Do I encourage people to vote for Kamala? Especially in swing states, yes. Is this tantamount to an endorsement, though? Hardly.

My encouragement comes in spite of Harris and her campaign. The vice president’s bid for the highest office in the land has been abysmal, squandering the early momentum she garnered in the wake of Joe Biden’s surprising decision not to seek a second presidential term and the promise that bringing Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a political figure synonymous with some fairly progressive reforms in his home state, on board as a running mate showed. Rather than striving to distinguish herself from the incumbent, whose evident cognitive decline and low approval rating in the face of soaring prices for essential items made him an unsavory candidate in the first place, America’s VP has billed herself as a continuation of Biden’s legacy. Consequently, whereas leftists were initially hopeful that Harris would aim to move the party more leftward, perhaps even hearkening back to some of her policy positions she espoused as a U.S. senator and primary challenger to Biden, those hopes have been dashed by the current campaign’s apparent refusal to even look left.

In an approach that would be baffling if many of us were not already accustomed to Democratic candidates exhibiting terrible political instincts, Kamala’s campaign has unconvincingly tried to woo voters by outflanking their Republican challenger from the right, including on issues that play directly into right-wing talking points and arguably, therefore, are a wasted effort. Stressing her background as a prosecutor, Harris paints herself as someone who would be tough on crime (even though violent crime is on the decline) and vows that her administration would make border security a priority, even when Trump has well established his stance on illegal immigration—for better or worse—and when critics are right to point out that if she and Joe Biden already have had four years to address the matter, why haven’t they done more? The Dems are trying to out-Trump Trump here, and it’s a strange look.

Reversing her position against fracking. Siding unflinchingly with Israel despite its existence as an apartheid state whose leadership is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people. About the only meaningful way Kamala has distinguished herself from Trump is her full-throated support for women to be afforded their due bodily autonomy. Otherwise, it’s been a lot of word salad, woefully short on details. Without looking it up, what is her signature policy proposal? Her slogan? Harris has talked a lot about an “opportunity economy” and has professed her love for small businesses—yeah, you and every other politician ever—but beyond a subsidy for first-time homebuyers, a child tax credit, and a ban on price gouging, not much stuck in my mind from the times I listened to debate moderators and prospective voters try to coax specifics out of the Democratic Party presidential candidate. As for her slogan, “we’re not going back?” “When we fight, we win?” I honestly can’t tell if the Harris-Walz campaign has even settled on one. Not exactly inspiring stuff when the idea is to communicate bold, decisive leadership.

Kamala Harris may yet win, an outcome I hope comes to pass. It’s not like Donald Trump and JD “I Lie about Haitian Migrants for Sport” Vance have run a particularly good campaign either. Still, if she does pull out an electoral victory, I feel like it will be in spite of herself rather than because she generated real excitement outside the “vote blue no matter who” crowd or because the Democrats have indicated that they’ve learned their lesson from 2016. In this respect, Dems have apparently conceded that the unbounded optimism of Barack Obama’s first campaign was little but a dog-and-pony show, a product of a bygone era, and that after Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the latter days of the 2016 presidential race, the solution is to double down on the same “safe” strategy of appealing to suburbanites/moderates, playing not to lose rather to win and inviting disaster when her opponent, a clownish septuagenarian with his own cognitive warbles, should at least in theory be easy to beat. Such is not the Democratic way, however. Reprehensible as Trump, Vance, and much of the Republican Party platform are, they are unapologetic in their depravity. The Dems? They perennially seem like they’re scared of their own shadow.

Particularly because the Biden-Harris presidential tandem has done little more than express “serious concern” to Benjamin Netanyahu and his cronies when tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them women and children, have been slaughtered in the supposed name of combating Hamas, no, I don’t endorse Kamala Harris. As least as far as my endorsement or non-endorsement is concerned, I suppose I am single-issue, but it’s, you know, kind of a big deal. The atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 are not to be minimized or defended, but they are informed by an ongoing Israeli occupation of contested lands and subjugation of the Palestinian people. Beyond that, how many dead Gazans does it take to satisfy the anger, fear, and loss felt after those terroristic attacks? What is the magic number?

I ask rhetorically, but I’ve heard it said that Oct. 7 is Israel’s 9/11, and the comparison seems all too apt when considering Israel’s military incursions into Lebanon, Syria, and Iran much in the way the United States veered into Iraq following the World Trade Center bombings under the flimsiest of pretexts. I thought Israel’s campaign was supposed to be about the hostages captured by Hamas. What does Hezbollah have to do with that aim? You can also spare me the Zionist talking points. “Israel has a right to defend itself.” As concerns October 7, Israel had a chance to defend itself—and it seemed disastrously unprepared despite apparent evidence that its leaders were provided intelligence about a potential attack, much in the way America was afforded intel on al-Qaeda’s intention to launch an attack on U.S. soil and failed to thwart those plans. Now scores of civilians are paying the price, with the Israeli Defense Force enjoying a decided advantage over Hamas militants in military conflict, backed by American weaponry and logistical support. But Israel has a right to defend itself. Right.

As stated earlier, though, owing to the stakes of this election, I encourage voters to pragmatically cast their ballots for Harris over Trump, even if I don’t endorse the current VP. Besides, presidential politics notwithstanding, there are down-ballot candidates whose elections stand to make more dramatic impacts on your life, not to mention critical ballot initiatives. But am I going to seriously begrudge those who at least publicly indicate that they won’t vote for Kamala on moral grounds or say they’ll vote for a third-party candidate whose stated values more closely resemble their own? No, and here are a few reasons why.

First and foremost, again, it’s my fundamental belief that it’s the candidate’s job to win your vote. The presidential campaign, way more of a slog than it should be, is, at its core, a sales pitch. Especially if the individual vying for office is unwilling to make concessions prior to Election Day, that’s on the party and the committee constructing the party platform. Secondly, browbeating prospective voters into choosing the Democratic Party candidate often doesn’t provide the desired effect. The most fervent Democratic supporters behave like merely casting doubt on the party’s anointed option is an offense and that it gives ammunition to the opposition, but if a candidate has flaws, perhaps even glaring ones, even Republican strategists can spot them. Thirdly, this handwringing/pearl clutching about professed non-voters conveniently ignores the political reality of the Electoral College. Since the popular vote in it of itself doesn’t decide the winner, in deep “blue” or “red” states like mine, the winner-take-all format all but ensures that my individual vote is unlikely to make a difference. Rather than trying to badger conscientious objectors, if you will, into submission, maybe we should be finding fault with, you know, the people who vote unabashedly for the bad orange man. We shouldn’t be absolving them for knowingly opting for the person whose very brand is cruelty and who regularly espouses Nazi rhetoric.

TL;DR: While I don’t explicitly endorse Kamala Harris for president, if you live in the United States and ballot access is not a serious issue, I encourage you to vote if you haven’t already—unless you’re a Trump supporter. In that case, think again—or stay home. If you don’t plan on voting, that’s your business, though especially if you live in a swing state, maybe consider “Pokémon GO-ing to the polls” to cast your ballot for Kamala. Last but not least, if you don’t live in the U.S., er, pray for us. We already elected Donald Trump once. We’re clearly not that smart.