I am tired of being told that voting is about making my voice heard.
My voice has never been the problem.
Black people have been speaking, organizing, marching, demanding, warning, teaching, building and telling this country exactly what we need for generations. We have not suffered from a shortage of voice. Neither have poor people, queer people, immigrants, disabled people, women, Indigenous people, working people or any of the communities most affected by the decisions made in rooms where we are too often absent.
America has heard us.
The question is what America does when we have power.
And voting—imperfect, insufficient and absolutely incapable of delivering liberation by itself—is one of the tools we have for exercising that power.
A vote is not a valentine.
It is not a declaration that you love a candidate. It is not a marriage proposal. It is not an endorsement of every decision that person has ever made or will ever make.
It is a transfer of power.
When we elect someone, we give them the authority to make decisions in our names.
They write laws. They decide how public money gets spent. They confirm judges. They oversee agencies. Governors sign or veto legislation. State legislators shape policy around schools, housing, labor, health care and criminal justice. Members of Congress decide what becomes federal law and what never makes it out of a committee.
That is why I refuse to talk about voting as though it is merely an expression of civic virtue.
Voting is an exercise in governance.
And on November 3, 2026, Americans will decide who holds an enormous amount of governing power.
This is a midterm election, which means there is no presidential race sitting at the top of the ballot consuming all the oxygen.
Good.
Maybe that will force us to pay attention to all the other people who have been governing us this whole damn time.
Stop Looking Only at the White House
We have trained ourselves to understand American politics almost entirely through the presidency.
Who is president? What did the president say? What did the president do today?
Meanwhile, Congress exists.
Statehouses exist.
Governors exist.
County governments exist.
School boards exist.
Judges exist.
And enormous decisions about our actual lives are being made in all of those places.
This year, control of Congress is on the ballot. As of late September, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates seven Senate contests as Toss Ups: Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas.
Control of a legislative chamber helps determine which bills receive hearings, what legislation reaches the floor, who chairs committees, what gets investigated and what gets ignored. In the Senate, it also affects the confirmation of federal judges and executive-branch nominees.
Power is not only the ability to cast a vote on a bill. Power is also the ability to decide which bills ever get voted on.
That is the kind of civic literacy I want us to develop.
Not just Who do you like?
I want us asking:
Who has power? What power do they have? Who gave it to them? What have they done with it? And when do we get to decide whether they keep it?
Those are different questions.
The Races Worth Knowing About
You do not need to become a political junkie between now and November 3. You do not need seventeen cable-news alerts on your phone. And you certainly do not need to spend every waking hour consuming polling.
But you should understand where political power could shift.
Watch the Senate contests in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas, currently rated Toss Ups by the Cook Political Report.
Watch the House—not because politics is a sporting event and we need another scoreboard, but because control of the chamber determines its leadership and legislative agenda.
Watch the governors' races, too. Governors aren't junior presidents. The decisions made in state capitals can reach your kitchen table long before something happening in Washington does.
And then look down your own ballot.
The race receiving the least national television coverage may have the most immediate relationship to your daily life.
Who represents you in your state legislature? Are judges on your ballot? What local referenda are being decided? Who controls your schools? Who makes decisions about policing, prosecution, public transportation, libraries, zoning and development where you live?
Democracy is not something that happens every four years in Washington, D.C.
It is happening down the street.
Voting Is Not Liberation
Here is where I may depart from the traditional voting-season sermon.
I will not tell you that voting will save us.
It won't.
There is no candidate you can elect who will relieve us of our responsibility to organize, protest, build institutions, care for one another, challenge systems, hold leaders accountable and imagine something better than what currently exists.
Freedom cannot simply be delivered to a community.
And I do not believe liberation is waiting for us inside a voting booth.
But I also refuse the idea that because a tool cannot accomplish everything, it accomplishes nothing.
Voting is a tool. Organizing is a tool. Protest is a tool. Mutual aid is a tool. Litigation is a tool. Art is a tool. Scholarship is a tool. Community is a tool.
The question is not whether one of them can single-handedly save us.
The question is whether we are willing to use every tool available to us while building the ones we still need.
November 4 Is Ours, Too
Do not let anyone reduce your political imagination to Election Day.
November 3 matters.
November 4 matters too.
If the person you vote for wins, your responsibility does not end because you helped put them in office.
Call them. Write them. Attend the meeting. Read the budget.
Ask where the money went.
Ask who benefited.
Ask who didn't.
Ask why.
And if you helped elect somebody, understand this especially:
Your vote does not obligate you to protect them from accountability. It gives you another reason to demand it.
We have confused political participation with political fandom for far too long.
Politicians do not need fans.
Democracy needs participants.
So yes, I want you to vote.
But more than that, I want you to understand what you are doing when you cast that ballot.
You are not simply “making your voice heard.”
You are deciding who gets to exercise public power in your name.
Know their name. Know the office. Know what that office can do. Know what they have promised. Know what they have done.
And then make your own damn decision.
That is what power requires of us.
Sources
Cook Political Report. 2026 CPR Senate Race Ratings. Updated September 23, 2026.
United States Senate. About Nominations. U.S. Senate, Powers & Procedures.
United States Senate. Nominations Confirmed (Civilian). 119th Congress.
