{"id":40900,"date":"2018-09-04T23:53:56","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T03:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wendybrandes.com\/blog\/?p=40900"},"modified":"2018-09-05T00:12:55","modified_gmt":"2018-09-05T04:12:55","slug":"your-vote-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wendybrandes.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/your-vote-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Vote Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York had its congressional primaries in June, and I spent a couple of hours standing on a sidewalk corner during evening rush hour on primary day, reminding people that they still had time to vote.\u00a0 It was informative. Every African-American woman I spoke to said she had already voted by that point. Black men and other people of color were generally receptive, even if they hadn’t voted yet, and a number of them asked until what time the polls stayed open.\u00a0 A lot of the white people were scary-rude.\u00a0 It was kind of traumatic, to be honest. I’m still bothered by one generic-looking white-guy-in-a-suit who stopped long enough to yell at me that he wasn’t “inspired” enough to vote and that politicians were all “the same.” Meanwhile, our longtime congresswoman Carolyn Maloney<\/a> had a first-time challenger that the dude probably didn’t even know about, because why bother to educate yourself when you have all the answers already?<\/p>\n