Stop voting for a color and vote for the best person

When you go to the polls in November, you should only vote for candidates who have brown hair.

None of these blondes or redheads or, God help us, bald people. Vote brown, all the way.

Stupid, right?

If someone walked up to you today and said any of the above to you, you’d think they’d lost their ever-lovin’ minds. And you’d be right.

Which is why it’s also stupid whenever anyone tells you to “vote blue” or “vote red.”

Do not do that.

You owe yourself and your fellow Americans a little more effort. Voting is not a team sport. It doesn’t work that way. Not for you, anyway. And how we ever came to believe that it does work—or how anyone could ever truly believe that they could bubble in a straight-ticket vote for one party’s candidates—is beyond my understanding of human beings.

In pretty much every other walk of life, we are inherently selfish, self-centered people. Except, it seems, when it comes to voting.

Then, miraculously, a whole bunch of us become very giving people. Willing to dismiss as unimportant or inconsequential our own wants and needs in service of “the party.” Willing to accept and defend the shortcomings that affect us personally in order to claim a team victory.

If you’d like to understand the downside of that situation, ask Republican voters today around Alabama.

They were certain that a vote for the Republican candidates, regardless of their policies and viewpoints, was the way to go. They didn’t vet them. They didn’t demand they answer questions. They didn’t hesitate to vote for them despite serious questions.

And so, here we are with unaffordable everything, ridiculously expensive gas because of a war none of us wanted, health care costs skyrocketing and certain to get exponentially worse in the coming years, no lottery or gambling regulation, data centers everywhere, Flock cameras tracking our every move and “school choice” sucking half a billion dollars out of our already underfunded public schools to supplement the fancy private educations of rich kids.

But hey, the team “won.”

Right?

Let’s be honest with each other for a minute—what y’all are doing makes zero sense, and you know it, don’t you? I mean, for the entire year, y’all sit around talking about how pathetic the state is at everything, how dysfunctional its government is, how bad the education funding and support system is, how screwed up the courts are, how corrupt this agency or that agency is, and then you go vote to put the same people from the same party in charge.

As you’re reading this, there is an ad running somewhere in this state telling you that you can’t let the Democrats in because they’ll destroy the state ... while at the same time, another candidate in the same party is running an ad telling you that he’s going to clean up the mess in this state.

Reconcile those two things for me, please.

But you know what they’re doing—they’re counting on you being stupid. They’re counting on you not putting one and one together. And they’re hoping that, ultimately, the team will win out.

That’s why so many Republican candidates keep telling you to vote for Republicans because if you don’t, this town/county/state could “turn blue.”

Oh no. Not blue.

Be honest—if it turned yellow-polka-dotted-on-pink, could things be much worse? Could you get screwed over any more?

Look at New York City. The people there lost their minds and elected a democratic socialist named Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim who was supposed to tear the city apart and send rich people running for the hills as his socialist agenda turned the city into a hellscape filled with crime and soaring inflation.

Instead, in less than a year, the guy has balanced the budget, made transportation more reliable and cheaper, expanded free and reduced-cost child care to tens of thousands of New York City children through quality pre-K programs, stabilized rents through a two-year freeze, opened a city-owned grocery store to provide lower-cost groceries to residents and watched crime fall to historically low levels.

It’s amazing what happens when you vote for the people with the better ideas.

And that’s exactly what Alabama is facing this election cycle. A choice of sticking with the same, tired BS that never improves anything for the average person or forgetting about the team and voting for the better ideas.

And you know it’s the same old tired BS that got us in our current mess because the people pushing it won’t even get up in front of you and talk about it and let you ask them questions.

Call me crazy, but I don’t care what color jersey the person has on. If he isn’t confident enough in his ideas and policies to stand on a stage or in front of a crowd and answer unfiltered questions or debate his or her opponent, I’m not voting for them. Ever.

This isn’t a team sport. Your ability to do this job you’re applying for—the one you’re asking me, a voter, to give you—directly affects my life and my ability to provide for my family, live in peace and quiet, pay my bills, have clean water and air, ensure my children receive a decent education and live in relative safety.

Voting for a color won’t find the best person to do any of that.