Editor’s Letter 11/5
Photo courtesy of NBC10 Philadelphia
Dear Readers,
Welcome to our special 11/4 election edition!
As many of you may know the mid-term elections are now upon us and will be taking place on November 8. To coincide with this, we decided to run a short refresh focused on the elections.
These are the most important mid-term elections in decades and it seems that there will be record voter turnout according to early predictions.
Many key issues lie in the balance, especially in PA. Climate change, abortion rights, fracking, inflation, and even democracy itself are on the ballot.
With that in mind, I urge you all to vote. Regardless of political affiliation, elections are becoming more important than ever and every voice must be heard in a functioning democracy.
I know it’s easy to feel jaded and not want to think about politics. These are issues that affect our everyday lives, so it’s important to have these uncomfortable conversations with ourselves and others.
Your vote is not wasted even if you vote for a losing candidate. In states like PA where elections are highly competitive every vote counts.
The Lehigh Valley specifically is key for election turnout. In the last 26 presidential elections, Northampton County has only chosen the losing candidate three times. Furthermore, a total of just 80,000 votes across key states such as Pennsylvania and Arizona kept Hillary Clinton from taking the Oval Office in 2016. To put that into perspective, Northampton County has nearly four times as many people as that.
PA is a major swing state in elections and when just a few thousand votes can turn the tide in a state of 12 million people, every single vote counts.
Before I sign off: if you’re interested in joining The Comenian please join us at our meetings, which take place every Wednesday at 5 pm in Zinzendorf Hall, room 100.
We are looking for new writers, photographers, videographers, graphic designers, and more, so if any of those interests you be sure to stop by or email me at [email protected].
The Comenian supports a wide range of content, so if you want to interview students around campus, you can. If you want to make video essays you can. If you want to make short comics, you can. Whether you want to write about news, politics, music, movies, sports, video games, food, history, or anything else, I guarantee you will have a place here.
Also, if you would like to be notified by email whenever we publish a new edition of the paper – either the online or print version – please send your address to [email protected]. We’ll add you to our email list!
Thank you for reading this week’s refresh. I hope you come back soon as we continue to publish new content every other week.
And don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!
Your editor-in-chief,
AJ
Tony • Nov 4, 2022 at 9:52 pm
Your main problem is paragraph 3. Voters don’t care about any of those things when there is inflation, a looming recession, crime, zero border control and foreign policies that make America look weak. The downfall of the Democratic Party is the misprioritization of what voters really care about.
AJ Minnich • Nov 7, 2022 at 11:35 am
Hate to break it to you, but 70% of the country does care about abortion rights, and over 52% believed climate change was real in 2016.
Inflation was inevitable because of the supply issues caused by covid along with both relief bills that Trump and Biden signed into law. I won’t say Biden isn’t at fault here for making inflation worse (because he is for shutting down the keystone pipeline) but it doesn’t entirely lie on one party or the other it was an inevitability because there’s been too much demand for too little supply.
Crime has gone down in the past 30 years with only a spike recently after COVID hit.
Biden approved the largest deportations in history within weeks of taking office. in comparison, Trump couldn’t even get his wall built because he refused to work with Pelosi and Schumer after striking a deal to have more DACA protections in exchange for the wall.
“Foreign policies that make America look weak” is just an objectively untrue statement. Just by giving Ukraine some of our military equipment they have been able to demolish Russian forces. All that does is show how powerful the US military truly is if just our equipment alone is able to eviscerate one of the world’s superpowers. Trump on the other hand took the word of Vladimir Putin more seriously than his own intelligence officials.
Only one party consistently stands with the rights and liberties of the American public and it certainly isn’t the republicans who want the power to overturn elections that don’t go in their favor, restrict gay marriage, loosen 1st, 4th, 6th, and 18th amendment protections, gut Medicare and Medicaid, and more.