I anticipate that many Americans will experience nervousness and anxiety as we approach this year’s elections. Speaking personally, I have concerns ahead of what may well be the last elections conducted under a semblance of democracy.
But I’ve heard that facing your fears head-on is the best way to vanquish them. So rather than bottle up these concerns and stew over them for months, I think it’s worthwhile to lay them out here. My hope is that speaking about these concerns openly helps us all devise ways to combat them.
So let’s get to it. Here are my top five fears heading into the 2024 elections.
No. 1: Social media-focused campaigns
I fear that this campaign season will be extremely online, with candidates more reliant than ever on social media platforms to spread their messaging. And I fear this will make voters more vulnerable to malicious actors and power brokers in the tech industry, who rely on tech tools — such as social media algorithms and artificial intelligence-enabled deepfakes — that make it easy to manipulate the public. (We’ve already begun to see this in action, FYI — read more here and here.)
No. 2: False equivalencies
I fear an uninformed and/or impulsive public that is allowed — or encouraged — to make false equivalencies between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. I find few things more dubious these days than the suggestion that Republicans and Democrats are “two wings of the same bird,” “two sides of the same coin” or any other cliche that implies the two major parties are remotely alike. Democrats still support liberal democracy, which is a vehicle to change policies that the public dislikes. Republicans, on the other hand, support a man in Trump who’s vowing to quash the sort of dissent and discussion that Democrats currently harbor in their party. These two things are not the same.
No. 3: Voter suppression and intimidation
I fear that a raft of voter suppression laws and voter intimidation…
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