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Please allow me to state something obvious before we get started: The most important thing about this November election is that it will give us a choice. Our politics are built on the very simple idea that we vote for who will be in power. Every one of our disagreements, disputes, and conflicts is solved first by debate, and then by the ballot. Violence of any sort has no place in a democracy. This weekend’s assassination attempt was a heinous, despicable act, and we roundly condemn any and all political violence.
That being said, our strong condemnation should not let us forget the other side of that opening paragraph, the choice part. Because this November we will still have to choose between many, many candidates for office, not just for President but for Congress and our own State Legislature, and the results will have real consequences.
We can start from the top. The Republican Party Platform is built around cultural grievance, pessimism, and resentment. It fits the overall outlook of the candidate at the top of the ticket. It also offers values not just mildly depressing in their bleakness, but that run directly against the American ideal. We are a relentlessly optimistic country that believes in our strength and celebrates our endless capacity to learn and embrace what is new. We are a country that wants to lead, not to retreat into itself; to expand freedom, not impose a reactionary, authoritarian outlook.
Setting aside the bleak, apocalyptic tone that has taken over the GOP under Trump, the policy priorities and ideas behind it will have truly devastating consequences for working families in our state. For starters, the Republican Party, for all of its populist posturing, is unapologetically the party of the wealthy, for the wealthy. Trump has proposed not only yet another massive tax cut for the very wealthy but also an across-the-board tax increase for everyone else. His tariff plan, imposing a 10% sales tax across the board on everything we import into the country, would raise prices from 2.5% to close to 7%, according to several estimates.
Look at it this way: Republicans are openly calling to cut taxes for big corporations and the ultra-wealthy and pay most of the budget hole by passing the bill to literally everyone else.
Not that the numbers add up, anyway. The proposed tax cuts are so large that even a broad tariff on imports will not cover the growing deficits. So Republicans in Congress have been pushing for massive cuts in spending, from SNAP to Medicaid, from school lunches to heating assistance. Trump’s very own Project 2025 associates (the planning group hosted by the Heritage Foundation for his second term) have advocated for even deeper cuts. For all the talk about protecting Social Security and Medicare, the GOP has also been carefully pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut Medicaid to the bone. Every one of these changes will mean leaving millions of working families, children, elderly, and disabled with unmet needs while simultaneously handing over billions of dollars to billionaires and corporations.
Shoveling money to the wealthy aside, the Republican Party as a whole offers a stark choice in many other areas. We have been enduring increasing heatwaves and extreme weather year after year as climate change accelerates around us. Clean energy, however, has turned a corner, and new solar and wind power plants are not just better for the environment but much cheaper to operate. Yet the GOP has vowed to throw out pretty much any environmental regulation on the books, giving free rein to the fossil industry and essentially undoing all the progress of recent years. Trump is offering expensive, dirtier energy, and climate destruction.
The stark choices are even bleaker on other issues. Trump has openly advocated for rounding up millions of our neighbors in concentration camps and launching the largest mass deportation program in US history. The GOP is still pushing for more immigration restrictions, notwithstanding their “state’s rights” rhetoric, and there is little doubt (and plenty of room under their own platform) for a fetal personhood law in Congress if they win a majority in November. The party has been gripped by increasingly aggressive anti-feminist rhetoric, with some voices even calling for more restrictive divorce laws and questioning same-sex marriage.
All this stack of incredibly bleak choices, by the way, sits alongside the fact that Donald Trump or his new vice president choice, J.D. Vance, care very little for democracy. The former President, besides being a committed fraudster and convicted felon, staged what can only be described as an attempted coup in 2020 after losing the election. His VP is new, after all, because he sent a mob to the Capitol with the sole aim of hanging his previous VP in the gallows they erected in front of the building. Mike Pence has not endorsed his former boss, not because of policy differences, but because he almost got him killed.
So, about our choice this November, then: It is time to vote because this is how we decide things in a democracy. Republicans have been very, very clear on who they will govern for, and it is not us. And the guy at the top of their ticket does not believe that elections and democracy matter. These, I am afraid, are still the stakes of this election.