There are those of us who will always vote no matter what. Sometimes, it’s because we are so passionate about our candidate, party, or cause. Increasingly, though, for many of us, it’s to prevent the worse (the much, much, much, much worse) of two evils from taking over our lives.  I’ve been a Democrat my entire voting life. I don’t have some grand coming-of-age story about how I discovered my political affiliations or how I came to believe in one party over the other. My views simply matched more closely with the liberal side of our political coin toss so I voted that way. Not much more thought went into it, really.

I started paying more attention after I lived abroad for the first time and got a close-up glimpse of politics in other countries. Some of those messes, at least as portrayed in the media, seemed to reinforce what I’d learned in school about the exceptionalism of our American democratic institutions, the near holiness of our Constitution, and a criminal legal system that was sold to us as perhaps imperfect, but ultimately the best humanity had thus far come up with. Of course, just the teensiest bit of digging quickly reveals that those “messes” also were created by design. Our design. You see, throughout the 20th century, the U.S. seemingly operated from a belief that the only way to assert and protect our supremacy, our white supremacy, was to insert ourselves in everybody else’s business, particularly in those countries with the misfortune of sharing a continent with us. The corruption we love to turn our nose up at, it turns out, is an American export. Perhaps our most pervasive.

Still, committed to the fantasy of our sometimes bumbling but ultimately benevolent superpower that had been ingrained in me since kindergarten, I returned from those first years abroad feeling like only one of our political parties was to blame for the abuses. Republicans, in my myopic view, were the clear villains; their anti-poverty, anti-immigrant, anti-Blackness all but seeping through the xenophobic policies they pushed through in the name of national security, or economic growth, or whatever fancy buzzword they used to dress things up with a big red bow for the masses. After all, it was the Rs that introduced us to the spectacularly disastrous war on drugs, the disgustingly effective Southern strategy, and the annihilator of civil liberties known as the Patriot Act. 

My tender, naïve young brain could not yet comprehend a world where there were no good guys so, of course, the same brush with which I painted all Republicans as evil, I used to paint all (or at least most) Democrats as saviors, valiantly fighting to keep those boogie men and their wicked worldview in check. But then I really started to pay attention.

My work over the last decade has required that I stay abreast of political fluctuations. No longer could I get away with simply skimming the headlines for the latest outrage over whatever Baby Bush was up to. Nope, now I was noticing how my elected reps were voting, reading prepared statements intended to explain away the sudden and pervasive absence of spines, listening to these politicians (the blue ones, the “good” ones) spin tales extolling the virtues of bipartisanship, the righteousness apparently to be found in the crumbs of compromise they try to sell as progress. As it turns out, nobody is out there trying to save anyone from anything.

Moving to Nevada was another eye-opener. I’d never lived somewhere with such easy access to our politicians, both local and federal. I had (have) political staffers’ phone numbers in my cell and when I or my clients call, someone always answers. It’s a beautiful thing, intoxicating even. Particularly in the Trump years, the proximity to those making crucial decisions about our lives was immeasurably comforting; representative government at its finest. In those first few years of that presidency, especially, we were all swimming upstream, our energy consumed with minimizing the irreparable damage being done to our institutions. Any failings on the part of our electeds could easily be blamed on the Trumpian hold over the Republican party. 

Then came the midterms, and for the first time in almost three decades, Nevada’s Democrats controlled the state Assembly, state Senate, and governor’s office. I remember how we celebrated that day, the relief that washed over our exhausted hearts and minds. Surely, now, with the holy trifecta of government in our hands and with full experiential knowledge of just how low the low will go, we were going to make magic in this state. Right?

Fast forward to 2021. This legislative session should have been awe-inspiring. And in the beginning, some of the proposed bills were. We were going to address our shattered economy without ignoring the irreplaceable contribution of immigrant workers. We were going to put an end to state-sanctioned murder. We were going to shield the most vulnerable in this terrible year from being thrown out of their homes over circumstances so completely out of their control that protecting them should never have been controversial. 

We did none of those things.

Sure, there were some gains. I hear, for example, that we may have a public healthcare option at some point in the future. Hopefully, the almost 400,000 Nevadans without health insurance can hold out long enough for the state to conduct the studies necessary to determine whether providing access to healthcare to more people will increase access to healthcare to more people. Progress. We also can now count on having lactation rooms in state courthouses, a wonderful and necessary accommodation for breastfeeding mothers to be sure, but I’m wondering how many of those mamas will find use for these rooms as they await to be summarily evicted from their homes, baby and all.

I don’t mean to minimize these or any other victories this session, small or large. I understand that progress is often made in baby steps and patience is a virtue, yada yada. But if all we can ever hope for are baby steps, even where the very lives and the dignity of our neighbors are on the line, even when we control all the centers of political power in the state, that’s simply not enough and shouldn’t be acceptable to any of us. 

And wait; just wait! Campaign season is coming once again. Watch as all these pols bend over backwards to convince us how much they care, how much they’ve done for the poor, the sick, the marginalized. Watch as they count on us forgetting that we know better. A whole lot of us will not forget. Lucky for them, though a whole lot of us will still show up. We will still vote for them. Because as disappointing as the Dems have been, and will surely continue to be, the other option is still so, so, so much worse. 

Talk about a mess. 

Martha E. Menendez, Esq. is the Bernstein Senior Fellow at the UNLV Immigration Clinic.