Your Job as a Voter

Welcome to Monday. Hope you all had a great weekend.

I flew up to Nashville on Friday and will be here until Wednesday for a photography conference I am helping one of my brand sponsors with. I will do my best to write some things for you all this week, as I am going now from the comforts of my hotel room at 6 in the morning... but no promises.

Today, I wanted to talk about our roles as voters. With both incumbents announcing their re-election campaigns within the last week or so, A LOT of people have chimed in on their thoughts on social media. "This person is not good for this county"... "Vote for this person"... and so on.

One of the ones that keeps coming up and drives me crazy is this.

"This person needs to go because they are not doing what their constituents and the people of the county want."

Pretty bold statement and one that always gets a ton of likes... but is it true?

First, I want to set up an example. This allows me to not point anyone specific out or paint someone in a positive/negative light.

Let us say there is a candidate that is running for office that says they want to cut down every single tree in the county and build buildings where they once were. Clear cut everything and build.

They go through their campaign stating that everywhere. They do the debates and candidate forums. They do their own events. They do mailers and social media ads. They do everything a regular candidate would do.

At every single event, they drive their message home.

"Trees stop progress. Cut them all down and build. That is progress."

Or whatever a candidate like that would say.

Come election night, they win. The first meeting that they are in office, they make a motion to change the tree protection element in the Comp Plan to state every tree needs to go. Throughout four years, they continue to make that statement and make similar motions.

Next thing you know, everyone on social media starts saying:

"This person is not doing what we elected them to do"..... or "This person is not listening to the voters."

Yet, they are doing exactly what they said they would do... and they won the election. Should people really be surprised when it really happened? That is somehow not listening to constituents?

This is where you all come in. It is YOUR responsibility to know the candidates and what they are about before you vote for them. If this scenario were to come to pass and the overwhelming majority were to complain about it, who's fault would that be? They were the ones that voted for them.

This certainly does not apply to everyone, but often times, we do not spend the time to educate ourselves on the candidates running for office. We see what social media says. We see the signs/mailers/etc. We see the news articles. We may watch a few of the larger events.

But we do not take the time to learn about the candidates and try to learn everything about them.

More importantly, we are in a society that for whatever reason, does not want to really discuss these types of things and local issues with friends and family. What had been common throughout the history of the US is now largely avoided. No one wants to talk about these issues to others, aside from social media, which can get out of hand in a hurry.

But these conversations are important. Not everyone can attend every single event... but they likely know someone who did. Why not have a discussion with them about what they saw/heard? Why not have in-depth discussions about the candidates? Why not share your knowledge about a candidate with other people.

It is our responsibility to vote for people we feel will do what is best and what we want to see. It is our responsibility to find out what each candidate thinks about various topics. Will they agree with you on everything? Nope. Find a politician that you agree with on 100% of everything... you are likely the only person you know that agrees with them on 100% of everything.

Point is, you will not find someone that you can agree with on 100% of everything, so we need to stop expecting that. Instead, we need to find out what candidates do think about various issues and then figure out which are the most important to us and vote from there.

Far too often, people vote for a name they recognize... or someone their family knows... or because they like the colors of their signs... or that they are not an incumbent... but none of those things are the candidate.

This is also why money tends to win elections. It does not happen all the time, as we saw Janet Barek win last year with FAR less money raised than her opponent, but generally speaking, the candidate that raises the most money wins.

She is actually the perfect example of what I am talking about. She won because people did not want her opponent any longer... not because she spent more money. People, by a small margin, decided they wanted Janet to represent Citrus/them and she won.

That is why it is important for us to be involved.

I went to every at least one even for every single person who ran in 2024, well except in my race obviously. I wanted to hear what they all stood for. I wanted to see how they interacted with people. I wanted to hear what other people thought.

Far too often, it is the supporters we see at the events. Nothing wrong with that at all, but the supporters support that person obviously. I would love to see more "regular" people showing up with an open mind and a willingness to listen to what that person stands for.

So my challenge to you this election cycle is to learn about the candidates and what their thoughts/visions are... even if you think you know them. Go to their events. Go ask them questions in person. Talk to your friends and family about what you learned vs what they learned. Get educated about the people running and then vote for the one you think is best.

Enjoy the rest of your day!