This year, no NBA games will be played on Election Day, Nov. 8.
“The scheduling decision came out of the NBA family’s focus on promoting nonpartisan civic engagement and encouraging fans to make a plan to vote during midterm elections,” the league announced Aug. 16 on social media.
The lack of NBA games on Election Day is one indication that the upcoming midterms are like no other in American history. This year’s contests are among the most consequential in our lifetimes.
That’s not hyperbole, or an exaggerated claim not meant to be taken literally.
Our president delivered a speech this month titled, “Battle For the Soul of the Nation.”
This is serious, folks.
Are you registered to vote? If not, you have until Oct. 23 to register online. In Illinois, you can apply now to receive a ballot and vote by mail.
“Skip the lines on Election Day and vote from the comfort of your living room,” the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Illinois announced Friday on social media, along with a link to an Illinois State Board of Elections webpage.
The page directs visitors to county clerk websites that provide vote by mail applications. People can email their completed forms to their county clerks. New this year is a feature that lets registered voters sign up for a “permanent vote by mail” option and automatically receive ballots for future elections.
Voters in the south and southwest suburbs and elsewhere would be mistaken to treat this year like a typical midterm election. There’s too much at stake. This is different from any previous situation we have known.
This is not politics as usual. This is not a case where both sides share equal blame for the divisiveness that characterizes our civil discourse. This year, democracy itself is on the ballot.
Too many Americans reject the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. They believe unfounded lies that the election was stolen because of baseless claims of fraud or wrongdoing.
Peddlers of such nonsense had their days in court, and they lost more than 60 legal attempts to prove their claims because no one could produce a shred of evidence that would change the outcome of the 2020 race.
“First, we must be honest with each other and with ourselves,” President Joe Biden told the nation in a Sept. 1 prime time address from Philadelphia. “Too much of what is happening in our country today is not normal.”
None of the major broadcast networks carried Biden’s address live that evening. They all, however, interrupted regularly scheduled programming Friday to air King Charles III’s first public remarks following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
The death of a British monarch is a big deal, but it seemed like the potential death of American democracy should have warranted better coverage by TV networks.
Since 2020, numerous losing candidates have refused to concede and questioned the legitimacy of the election process. Voters need to turn out in the midterms to show their faith in the integrity of our elections.
Another grave threat to our tradition of free and fair elections is the threat of violence.
The deadly Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol shows how threats have escalated to actual violence. After the FBI retrieved top-secret classified documents former President Donald Trump took with him after he lost the 2020 election, a U.S. senator recklessly invoked rhetoric about violence.
“There will be riots in the street,” if Trump is prosecuted for breaking the law, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Aug. 28 on Fox News.
Biden’s speech seems to have raised awareness about threats to our democracy.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” Biden told the nation.
A criminal prosecution of Trump seems imminent. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol will resume public hearings in the weeks leading up to the election.
Perhaps most notably, the Supreme Court’s decision in June to take away a woman’s constitutional right to make health care decisions changed the dynamic of the midterms. Since then, far more women have registered to vote than men.
“Women Are So Fired Up To Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It,” declared the headline of a Sept. 3 New York Times guest essay by political analyst Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, a data and polling firm.
Huge numbers of women are registering to vote in Kansas, Louisiana, Idaho, Wisconsin and other red states where women are concerned about losing access to abortion services.
“In my 28 years of analyzing elections I had never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics,” Bonier wrote. “Women are registering to vote in numbers I never witnessed before.”
In Kansas, for example, 69% of new voter registrants were women.
“This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle,” Bonier wrote.
The historic trend is that the party occupying the White House typically loses seats in the House and Senate during midterm elections.
There is a growing sense that this year’s midterms are of historic importance. All who are eligible should exercise their right to vote and participate in preserving our democracy.
Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown.
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