Is anyone in the U.S. persuadable? An author talks to AOC and other ‘Persuaders’ about how they won power
I live in Madison, Wis., which is a small town of about 24,000 people. If you live outside of the U.S., you might think Madison has a population of maybe one million people. But then again, not many people live in Madison, the capital city in Wisconsin.
We didn’t expect to have a presidential election this year. But then it happened. We had already been on the ballot once for a U.S. Senate race. And we’ve always voted Republican. So to be on the ballot for a presidential election now was a shock to the country. We were on the ballot the first two weeks of the Republican national convention. And then, in the last couple of weeks, we saw two other candidates step forward from Wisconsin: Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. But so far, the party didn’t pick either of them to be their candidate. In fact, their names didn’t show up anywhere in any state ballot. That was when we began to sense a real possibility that our state might elect a third candidate, and one of our friends here on the show was right, and he was absolutely right: It looked like they were going to go for Donald Trump.
But then it happened. You and I both know that we can either vote in the national election or we can vote in the presidential election. We can’t vote for the national candidate. We can’t vote for the U.S. president. That’s not in our power. So if I could vote in person from here in Madison, I would. I don’t have to vote in person. I can vote online. I can vote a few different ways, including in person. There’s a lot of ways to do it, and the easiest one for me to use is to vote with my smartphone. But you know what, as a citizen, I am under no obligation to go out of my way to cast my vote, whether through voting machines or by emailing a ballot or by voting on the phone.
So for