People never seem to hear me. My physical voice isn’t very high pitched, but it seems like no one hears me. If I raise my volume people tell me not to yell. I often have to relay information through my husband, who doesn’t speak loudly but people can hear him. It’s depressing sometimes. I voted today (we have mail in ballots). My voice in politics is usually not heard either.

We have a top two primary. That means that the two with the most votes go to the general election regardless of party (so you may not even have a Democrat and a Republican on the general ballot). We had 25 candidates for one US Senate position and 11 for state senate. Party affiliations are listed as “prefers Party Name“. In addition to several candidates each from the duopoly, quite a few were independents and one was FRFD (or maybe FDFR, I’ve recycled the pamphlet and it’s too hot to go fishing for it in our bin). I didn’t look it up, our hypothesis is that it was profane.

I felt like many of the people running for the US Senate don’t know what the senate does. It wound up being not much of a choice when you ruled out people who were oblivious to what the job entails. However, I caught a break in the state senate race. I went to middle school with one of the candidates and, not only did she put together a cogent statement showing she understood about the issues and the needs of our area, I know her to be a good person: she cares about people, our community and works very hard to make things better. Naturally she’s not favored, but I felt good about voting for her, something I rarely feel these days.

I thought it was interesting that there are 25 running for US Senate and only one Democrat (the incumbent) and one Republican for US Representative for our district. I felt cornered: I don’t care for our representative. Not that I disagree with most of her positions, I just find her too extreme and her style too in-your-face to get anything done in today’s congress. We need moderation and cunning. Last time we had several good candidates and I would have liked to see one of them try again. I feel a bit like the stage has been managed, possibly by hostile forces to try and “flip” our district.

By voting I whispered into the wind…but at least I felt really good about one candidate.