Braker

I still remember when in 1971 the voting age changed from 21 to 18, giving the right to vote to young men old enough to go to war. The unanimous Senate vote for the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, followed by strong support in the House of Representatives, and the historically quick ratification by the states signaled national agreement.

By the presidential election in 1972 there were 11 million new voters in the mix. I was not yet old enough to vote in that election, with my first opportunity the mid-term election of 1974, and by 1976 voters faced the choice of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale against Gerald Ford and Bob Dole. Voting for someone who aligned with my values was important to me, something I still look for when consulting the voters guide or the online Ballotpedia website to help make a decision in contested races.

While I remember the OPEC oil embargo impacting daily life in the early 1970s, the stubborn inflation known as stagflation throughout that decade, along with recession and the growing federal budget deficits of the 1980s, I don’t remember voting based on those factors alone. Only now in hindsight many election cycles later I am aware of what role the economy played, because of the importance of job security and economic stability for our sense of well-being.

There are some prominent and long-standing myths as to the soundest leadership on supporting a strong domestic economy. History tells a different story: of a party inclined to hold back in times of crisis, rather than bring the power of the federal government into play to control monopolistic efforts in the business world; of the other party utilizing a role for public entities and government in the economy, along with small businesses and large corporations. Twice in our history with both the Great Depression and the Great Recession, inaction in the first party took us to the cliff and beyond, and the other party led the country back to recovery.

More recently we experienced unprecedented setbacks in the economy brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The road to recovery was not easy or swift, but we’ve managed to outpace comparative nations in the developed world. Improvements in recovered employment, increased wages, a rise in gross domestic product, private fixed investment (business investment), increased federal budget receipts, and reduction in federal budget deficits are remarkable.

And this is part of a pattern over many administrations in the same party. I just came across a set of tables compiled from data gathered by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bloomberg LP in a report titled “Economic Performance in the United States. A Comparison of Democratic vs. Republican Administrations in the Post-War Era, 1948-2023.” The patterns of red and blue lines across graphs representing the years of Republican and Democratic administrations demonstrated how frequently the supposed party of business was not the party of the better economic measures.

Many economists have been warning of the comparative costs of each presidential candidate’s proposals, and it looks like the indicators of the past will only repeat themselves yet again. I trust the party that brought us out of the Great Depression, took us beyond the corruption of the Watergate scandal, charted a way out of the Great Recession and carefully reigned in the most recent inflation while avoiding recession.

Confronted by a woman surprised by my campaign T-shirt at one of the Pendleton Round-Up parades, she voiced her disapproval, asking how I could support “her.” I mentioned shared values. She shook her head in disagreement. And then I told her about my mother, a refugee from post-war Germany, who became a proud “God bless America” patriot, so shocked by the man who entered the White House in 2016. A man who shared her German heritage, he does not share the lessons her experiences with dictatorship taught her. We agreed to disagree as we parted.

I hope this year’s election challenges us to take our civic responsibility seriously, with choices on our ballot top to bottom an opportunity to consider how to solve local and national problems, and joining to create “a more perfect union.”