November 2024 is a referendum
Call it a referendum. Call it a ballot measure. Whatever. The race at the top of every voter’s ballot next year will not be a race for president. Not pumped enough to show up and vote in a race between (highly likely) two old white men? How do you feel about a choice between authoritarianism and democracy? That’s what’s really the first contest on your ballot.
Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré (Ret.) is counting on Gen Z, first-time voters to help save the country he served for decades:
In 2024, 41 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote. For the youngest 8 million of this group, Election Day in 2024 will be the first in which they are old enough to cast a ballot, according to recent findings by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
This new generation of voters will be the most diverse our nation has ever seen. And already, these same young people have been politically engaged. In recent years, young people have been outspoken about some of the most contentious issues of our time, from climate change to reproductive rights to racial injustice. Yet the young people who have been engaged online, and in their communities, need to put that same energy into registering themselves and their peers to vote.
It’s become a cliché this century that every election is the “most important of our lifetimes.” It may be cliché, but it’s true. With every recent election, the stakes seem to become higher, and the consequences of low voter turnout have become greater.
(Yeah, I hate that cliché too. But for a different reason. When politicos pitch every election as a sky-is-falling event, Democrats, those policy liberals, become campaign conservatives. Playing it safe won’t save us.)
“Not the odds, but the stakes,” says NYU’s Jay Rosen. People need to focus on the stakes.
Where the stakes were women’s reproductive rights post-Dobbs, voters in state after state stepped up to preserve those rights. Balloptpedia provides an accounting:
2023
2022
- Michigan Proposal 3, Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative (2022)
- Kentucky Constitutional Amendment 2, No Right to Abortion in Constitution Amendment (2022)
- Montana LR-131, Medical Care Requirements for Born-Alive Infants Measure (2022)
- Vermont Proposal 5, Right to Personal Reproductive Autonomy Amendment (2022)
- California Proposition 1, Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment (2022)
- Kansas No State Constitutional Right to Abortion and Legislative Power to Regulate Abortion Amendment (August 2022)
In every case, in red state and blue, voters chose to protect women’s reproductive freedom. That choice could be on ballots in 15 more states — at the bottom, not the top — across the country in 2024:
2024
- Iowa No State Constitutional Right to Abortion Amendment (2024)
- South Dakota Right to Abortion Amendment (2024)
- Florida Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
- Nebraska Prohibit Abortion Procedures and Drugs Initiative (2024)
- Missouri Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment (2024)
- Arizona Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
- Pennsylvania No State Constitutional Right to Abortion Amendment (2024)
- Nevada Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment (2024)
- Colorado Abortion Ban Initiative (2024)
- Missouri Regulations Regarding Abortion Amendment (2024)
- Colorado Right to Abortion and Health Insurance Coverage Initiative (2024)
- Nebraska Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
- Arkansas Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
- Montana Right to Abortion Initiative (2024)
- New York Equal Protection of Law Amendment (2024)
- Maryland Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment (2024)
Just because climate change and racial injustice are not explicitly on your ballots as well doesn’t mean they aren’t there too. They are. Right at the top where you’ll choose between authoritarianism and democracy.
Democrats and aligned 501 groups must make it clear, especially to younger voters, that the 2024 presidential race is a referendum not only on preserving our democracy, but on reproductive rights, climate change and racial justice as well. Voters from all parties turned out to successfully defend reproductive rights in Kansas, in California and in Vermont, and in Montana, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio.
Honoré lays out the stakes as a career soldier might:
The 2024 presidential election, however, is not about red versus blue, Republican versus Democrat. Think what you will of the incumbent, President Biden, but the frontrunner for the other party has made his intentions clear. Former President Trump — the leading Republican candidate — is campaigning on an “authoritarian vision for [a] second term.” He’s suggested turning the law enforcement power of the federal government against his political opponents. He’s asserted that military generals should be loyal to their leader — not, first and foremost, to the Constitution. He and his advisers have discussed using the Insurrection Act to turn the U.S. military on protesters in cities and on migrants at the southern border. And, as we’ve seen before, he’s more than willing to deny the outcome of any election he doesn’t win.
If young people don’t vote in droves in the 2024 election, alongside older Americans of goodwill and conscience, to keep Trump from returning to power and cementing power as an authoritarian leader, there may not be a 2028 presidential election. Historians and political scientists have warned that failed coup attempts — like the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection — are often “dress rehearsals” for a successful coup.
At this moment, we face two existential threats: the global rise of authoritarianism and the ongoing climate crisis. After decades of assessing and neutralizing threats, I have one message for young voters: If we do not preserve our democracy and our climate, nothing else matters.
As the song written the same day as the Pearl Harbor attack goes, “We did it before and we can do it again | and we will do it again.”