Any candidate for president must make the case to Americans that their vote will make a difference to their communities and to the rest of the country. The stakes of any election are also deeply personal. Members of the Times editorial board explain what is motivating their vote in 2024.
Mara Gay
In the year Since the Oct. 7 attacks, it has sometimes felt as though America, already divided, might tear itself apart.
During the same period, a remarkably varied group of Americans — Jewish and Muslim, Arab and Black — have been united in their love for Samantha Woll, an activist for social justice and president of the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue in Detroit. She was found dead outside her home on Oct. 21, 2023, the victim of a homicide.
Sam was my classmate and my friend. After her death, expressions of disbelief flooded my phone from those who knew her. “Someone murdered our friend,” one of them wrote, speaking for us all. She was just 40 years old.
When I vote for Kamala Harris this November, it will be for her.
Many people have called Sam a “bridge builder” because of the work she did to bring together Jewish and Muslim communities in Detroit, and that is true. Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who is a Palestinian American, called Sam a “friend” and a “deeply loved member of our social justice community.”
But Sam also took sides. She was a proud supporter of Israel. She was a feminist. She was a Democrat who worked on many national, state and local political campaigns. What was unusual about Sam was that she cared about you even if she didn’t agree with you. She understood that contributing to a thriving community means investing in people who may not look like you, vote like you or pray as you do.
Sam was my sparring partner at the University of Michigan, where we shared many of the same values but argued, often and animatedly, about how to achieve them. Even in college, she was a political force. She led a student group that supported Israel and was part of another that defended affirmative action. She served in student government and helped lead a campaign to push the university to divest from Coca-Cola over human rights abuses it was accused of committing in Colombia. I wrote for the student newspaper, and I can still see her marching into the newsroom, determined to win our support for her latest campaign.
Weeks before she died, Sam wrote an email defending the Black Lives Matter movement to family members. “Yes, I am very proud to display a BLM sign on my door,” she wrote in a note shared with me by her sister. “As a very proud Jew it is important for me to express this,” she said. “It is a form of Tikkun olam,” a tenet of Judaism that calls for repairing the world.
Sam knew that while politics is about self-interest, it doesn’t have to be about selfishness. As Americans prepare to vote this November, I wish more than ever that Sam had lived long enough to see a woman in the Oval Office, and long enough to keep sharing her big, beautiful vision of the world.
Serge Schmemann
I’ve spent much of my working life overseas, and I know how closely the world watches American presidential elections. Our presidents have started wars and mediated peace, opened and sealed American borders to seekers of refuge, coddled dictators and punished them, opened trade and blocked it.
Each such action has affected untold numbers of people in every corner of the world, and occasionally, we Americans witness this impact. It was hard not to be moved recently when President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris greeted the Americans returning from Russian captivity, the result of a patient cultivation of contacts and allies around the world that is American global statecraft at its best.
The result of this November’s election could determine whether the embattled people of Ukraine and in the Middle East, and citizens of our many other allies around the world can continue to believe in American steadfastness and diplomacy.
When I vote, I do so with the knowledge that Joe Biden and his administration handled the many crises they faced capably, honorably and effectively. They restored American alliances after the damage done by Donald Trump; they ended American military operations in Afghanistan that had become counterproductive; they led the world in supporting Ukraine against Vladimir Putin. And in dealing with the war in Gaza, perhaps Mr. Biden’s greatest foreign policy trial, they navigated between loyalty to Israel and its brutality on the battlefield, and a wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at home. The president and his deep familiarity with foreign affairs were the driving force, but Ms. Harris took on many difficult diplomatic assignments, from reassuring allies at the Munich Security Conference to seeking solutions to the migration crisis in Central America.
So I will be voting for Ms. Harris, and for a world that acutely needs a responsible foreign policy rooted in alliances and human rights. I will also be voting against the return of Mr. Trump. I believe, as do many foreign policy experts around the world, that Mr. Trump poses a serious danger to the world. His decisions while in the White House were capricious, ignorant, transactional or inscrutable, delivered in a style that was often intolerably rude to America’s closest allies. His fawning relationship with Mr. Putin, including several private conversations that Mr. Trump has taken pains to keep secret, poses grave questions about possible entanglements and his judgment. Mr. Trump’s appalling demand of political favors from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine led to his first impeachment.
I would urge all voters to remember the global consequences of the mark on their ballot. America’s democratic allies are anxiously wondering whether the Trump presidency was an anomaly, or the first fracturing of our democracy, one that could turn the United States from steadfast friend into an unpredictable threat. Authoritarian leaders, from Mr. Putin to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, are also waiting to see whether Americans will elect Mr. Trump, their kindred spirit, or Kamala Harris, a candidate who is ready to stand up to them.
So when I vote, I am voting for millions out there who have no say in whom we choose. Our choice may have a greater impact on their lives than on ours.
Farah Stockman
I’m voting for all the people in left-behind places who are finally getting a chance to embrace the future rather than cling to a fading past.
I met one of them, Jacob Hannah, in 2022, at a national meeting of the Just Transition Fund, which helps coal mining communities diversify their economies. The gathering was full of people from Appalachia who had spent their whole careers organizing a Marshall Plan for the region. Mr. Hannah is the son, grandson and great-grandson of West Virginia coal miners, and he told me that some people in his hometown treated him like a traitor when he went to college to study environmental management. Just saying the words “recycling” or “clean energy” could generate hostility. That was the language of outsiders who wanted to get rid of coal, the basis of everyone’s livelihood.
Today, Mr. Hannah runs a nonprofit group that is helping to bring a solar power generator to West Virginia land that had once been used for a coal mine. His organization, Coalfield Development Corp., is the lead partner in a local coalition that won $62.8 million in grants from the Build Back Better Regional Challenge under the Biden-Harris administration. Now both the coalition and Coalfield Development have the money to do everything from on-the-job training to cleaning up toxic industrial sites to supporting new, environmentally sustainable businesses. Coalfield Development is also part of Appalachian Community Capital, a regional development corporation that received $500 million from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to launch a “green bank” that will lend to climate-friendly businesses.
That funding feels like the Marshall Plan that Mr. Hannah and his colleagues had long been pushing for. For him, it’s also a chance to continue his family’s legacy as an energy producer. He likes to talk about how coal is just sunlight stored in the ground for a billion years. “Now I can just cut out the middle man and mine the sun,” he told me.
One of the major legislative achievements of the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act, directs billions in tax credits to coal mining communities like his. It isn’t perfect. It’s still really hard for rural places to navigate the federal bureaucracy required to access this money. But the administration is working on making it easier. And just applying for one of these grants forces communities to work together in new ways and agree on a vision for their shared economic future. Even Republicans are touting the jobs that are being created. That’s a sign that these investments are making a difference. I believe that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will continue investing in the once-forgotten communities that need it most.
David Firestone
I’m voting on behalf of Rob Bohl, a 21-year-old Hudson Valley worker who found a great job after finishing a work force training program paid for by the Biden-Harris administration’s American Rescue Plan. Mr. Bohl is one of hundreds of thousands of young people who have gone to work in the last four years with an associate degree and skills training they got at a community college.
Developing careers for people who don’t have four-year college degrees has been a signature priority for this administration. In part that was spurred by the first lady, Jill Biden, an English and writing professor at Northern Virginia Community College, but even before the 2020 election Kamala Harris had been an enthusiastic supporter in the Senate of making tuition free for everyone at community colleges, and for low- and middle-income students at other public institutions.
More than half of the country’s high school graduates don’t go directly to a four-year college, and the administration has invested hundreds of millions in work force training, community colleges and apprenticeships to get those students the skills they need. In the last year alone, community college enrollment grew by 200,000 students, or 4.7 percent, significantly outpacing overall college enrollment.
Mr. Bohl was one of those students. After graduating from Haldane High School in Cold Spring, N.Y., in 2021, he and his family were daunted by the cost of a four-year college, and he wasn’t sure what direction he wanted to go in. He enrolled at Dutchess Community College in nearby Fishkill, N.Y., after deciding their electrical technology program sounded interesting. What he didn’t expect was that the college would open a $3 million mechatronics lab last year, to provide state-of-the-art training in his field. It was funded by the American Rescue Plan (as Mr. Biden’s 2021 stimulus bill was called) as well as state and county grants.
The new lab is “a crazily drastic change from all the old equipment we used to have,” he told me, and the training “turned out to be exactly what we needed to know for all the open jobs around here, like a one-to-one match.”
The lab teaches robotics, motor controls, hydraulics and HVAC skills, which are necessary to operate and maintain the latest technology in assembly lines, warehouses and wholesale distribution centers. When he finished at Dutchess, Mr. Bohl said he immediately had multiple job offers and went to work as a maintenance technician at The Gap’s distribution center in Fishkill, which has invested heavily in the latest technology.
“Everybody in my class had a job as soon as they were done at Dutchess,” he said. “There’s tons of different jobs up here, and working in robotics is fun. And at some point if I want to, my credits will transfer and I can get a four-year degree at SUNY Polytechnic.”
This fall, in fact, Mr. Bohl took those credits and enrolled at Polytechnic in an electrical engineering program, where he is scheduled to get a bachelor’s degree in two more years. He said he will continue to work at The Gap warehouse during the summers.
Warehouses and other employers in the Hudson Valley have more jobs than they can fill, despite rising wages, because not enough workers have the technical skills they are looking for. Kamala Harris and others in the Biden administration made it a priority to create careers for those workers, knowing that their future is also that of the nation.
Jesse Wegman
I’m voting on behalf of Crystal Mason, a 49-year-old grandmother from Fort Worth, Texas, who wasn’t allowed to vote for most of the last 12 years — and who may soon lose that right again, all for trying to do her part as a responsible citizen.
I first wrote about Ms. Mason in 2021, detailing the odyssey she has endured at the hands of Texas’s criminal justice system, which has responded to her offense — voting when she was ineligible — with a severity more often reserved for violent criminals.
It started in 2016, when Ms. Mason cast a provisional ballot in the presidential election. She had recently completed a prison sentence for a federal tax conviction, but she did not realize that Texas law also bars voting by people on parole or probation. Perhaps that’s because the official letter informing her of this was sent to her house only after she had been incarcerated. Or perhaps it’s because felony disenfranchisement laws are inherently complex and confusing, even to the people who write them. “I would not have known that being on supervised release would have made you ineligible,” one Republican lawmaker from Texas said.
Ms. Mason’s uncertainty was the reason she cast a provisional ballot. Indeed, this is exactly what provisional ballots are for. But Tarrant County prosecutors didn’t care. They charged Ms. Mason with illegal voting, winning a conviction in a one-day trial in 2018. She was sentenced to five years in prison. To add insult to injury, the court sentenced her to an extra 10 months for violating the terms of her release.
In March, a Texas appeals court overturned Ms. Mason’s conviction, finding that the trial court had misunderstood the relevant law, just as she did. Even still, prosecutors refused to relent. In April, they petitioned to get her conviction reinstated.
Whatever the ultimate result of Ms. Mason’s case, Texas’s cruel and absurd crusade against her has no doubt scared off untold numbers of other Texans with criminal convictions from attempting to perform the most basic task of democratic citizenship. When even honest mistakes are punished with prison terms, why take the chance?
To borrow a familiar phrase from the Trump years, the fear and confusion is the point.
Felony disenfranchisement laws are part of the broader antidemocratic project by Republican lawmakers and politicians who are convinced they can win elections only with a smaller (and usually whiter) electorate. The laws vary state by state, but their intended effect is the same — to drive down voter turnout, especially among Black Americans like Ms. Mason, who are disproportionately likely to be affected by felony disenfranchisement laws and, not coincidentally, more likely to vote for Democrats.
I don’t know whom Ms. Mason chooses to vote for when she is eligible, but I do know which party is doing everything in its power to keep her from being able to exercise that choice. It’s wrong, it’s racist, and it’s incompatible with the survival of a representative democracy.
Michelle Cottle
In the first presidential election since the end of Roe v. Wade, I will be voting not only for all the amazing women who have touched my life, but also for the millions I will never personally cross paths with — even those who cannot conceive of terminating a pregnancy.
Among those on my mind are the political canvassers in Kansas whom I followed door to door in the summer of 2022. They implored voters to reject a ballot measure that would have removed the right to abortion from the state Constitution. (They won.) I’ll be thinking about the activists I have interviewed over the years; the mothers who are dismayed that their daughters have fewer rights than they did; my friends who have had abortions for reasons that are absolutely no one’s business but their own.
Most urgently, I will be voting for my teenage daughter and the multitude of young women who are anxious and uncertain about what a post-Roe world will bring.
I grew up in a religiously conservative family, deep in the Bible Belt, with deeply traditional views about sex and procreation. Over the years, my perspective shifted leftward. And while I still tilt toward the Clinton-era notion that, ideally, abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” no issue gets my blood up like the relentless push to deny women control over their own bodies. It is an intrusion no man would tolerate.
Republican leaders have been chipping away at abortion rights for decades, largely through state laws. Donald Trump took things to the next level, filling the Supreme Court with justices who stripped women of their constitutional right to bodily autonomy. In doing so, the court sent a message to every woman: You cannot be trusted to manage your own person.
This fight is not over. Those who believe that the state should have dominion over women’s reproductive decisions are just getting warmed up. A federal abortion ban is high on their to-do list, but it is not the extent of their ambition. Abortion opponents are already taking aim at contraception and in vitro fertilization, or I.V.F.
Kamala Harris has been this administration’s leading champion of reproductive rights. Far more comfortable with the issue than is President Biden, she is eloquent and unapologetic in her defense of those rights — and in drawing the connection to women’s health more broadly. She understands what is at stake.
It is hard to know what Mr. Trump understands or even believes. Not that it much matters. He heads a party that has made curtailing women’s reproductive freedom central to its brand, and he boasts about having advanced that mission. In this area, as in so many, he has made his contempt for women clear.
For a “pro-choice” voter, there is only one choice in this contest.
Brent Staples
I will vote this fall in remembrance of my great-great-grandmother Somerville Lowry Staples, who steered our family out of slavery and negotiated the shoals of what passed for freedom in 19th-century Virginia. Somerville was an enslaved adolescent when the slave rebellion led by her fellow Virginian Nat Turner served notice that the road to abolition would pass through rivers of blood. By the time that prophecy was realized in the form of the Civil War, she had been sold to a doctor who lived in Bedford County, in the southern part of the state. The plantation house where she was held in bondage still stands today.
In Bedford, Somerville gave birth to the first freeborn member of our line, my great-grandfather John Wesley Staples. He came into the world on July 4, 1865, several months after Virginia formally abolished slavery with the 13th Amendment. Her aspirations for this freedom baby are reflected in his namesake, the abolitionist theologian who founded the Methodist church.
The Staples family had a front-row seat for Reconstruction, the brief period during which the federal government deployed military force to protect Black political rights in the former Confederacy. Somerville witnessed the arrival of the 15th Amendment, which promised Black men the vote, and she was present for what must have seemed a miraculous sight: formerly enslaved men queuing up to cast ballots as free persons.
Somerville saw African American politicians swept into political office when Black voting rights seemed secure. Her son saw those politicians swept out again when Reconstruction collapsed, and the Southern states stripped Black Americans of the citizenship rights they had so briefly enjoyed.
After Black children were shut out of school, John Wesley Staples and his immediate neighbors built a one-room schoolhouse at the intersection of their three properties; the three households shared the cost of the teacher’s room and board. (The composition book in which my great-aunt Sophronia Lee Staples rehearsed penmanship during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt is a prized family possession. )
The family successfully defended itself through force of arms, but there was no defense against the systematic disenfranchisement that was the fulcrum of Jim Crow rule. Black citizens were written out of Southern state constitutions, denied the vote and subjected to a campaign of racial terrorism, the goal of which was to reinstate slavery by another name. It was not uncommon to find counties that had large Black populations but virtually no Black Americans on the voting rolls or in the jury pools.
The antidemocratic sentiments that extinguished Black political rights in the 19th and early- 20th centuries are evident today, in Republican gerrymandering in the South and other disenfranchisement. When I vote, I do so while thinking about the most reprehensible period in American political history.
Binyamin Appelbaum
When I vote for Kamala Harris, I will be thinking about my daughter.
I don’t claim to understand fully what it meant to my teenager to see Ms. Harris on the stage at the Democratic National Convention, but I know that it moved her profoundly. Ms. Harris is a role model for my daughter in a way that I never can be. It is not, I think, that Ms. Harris’s candidacy broadens her sense of possibility, but rather that it broadens her sense of plausibility. Not that the United States could have a female president, but that it might.
Ms. Harris is fighting for the rights of women — and were that all, it would be enough. She is fighting for a better future for all Americans — and were that all, it, too, would be enough. She is running against a man who treats women with contempt, who has no interest in the public interest, who wants to watch the world burn. And were that all, the imperative to defeat that man, Donald Trump, would surely be enough.
But it is not enough. I want something more. I want to see the look on my daughter’s face when she learns that a woman named Kamala Harris will be the 47th president of the United States.
I want that moment for millions of girls and mothers and childless cat ladies all across this great nation. And then I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Jeneen Interlandi
When I cast my ballot for the Democratic ticket this November, I will be thinking first and foremost of my parents, both of whom suffer from dementia, and both of whom moved into a nursing home this spring. They were able to do so only with the help of Medicaid, a health insurance program that has sustained them in their twilight years, and one that Republicans have long dreamed of eviscerating.
Despite covering more than 90 million Americans, Medicaid remains one of the most deeply misunderstood components of America’s wildly complicated and overpriced health care system. The program’s primary purpose is to provide health insurance for low-income Americans. It is a crucial safety net for both the elderly (nursing home care can cost upward of $8,000 a month and is not generally covered by Medicare), and the disabled (who can’t access employer-based coverage because they can’t work).
Contrary to the myths promoted by conservatives for decades, Medicaid does not reward laziness or incentivize dependence. Survey after survey has found that most Medicaid recipients who are physically able to work actually do. As a public health reporter, I have talked to preschool teachers on Medicaid, as well as law school students, housekeepers and single moms with serious health conditions. Some hold multiple part-time gigs at once. Others have full-time jobs that don’t offer health insurance.
None of them are, as Republican mythology would have it, living high on the hog. In fact, in most states, the income eligibility standards for Medicaid are so strict that Medicaid beneficiaries cannot own a home or have more than about $2,500 in the bank. (My parents were nearly expelled from the program last year, after they sold their 20-year-old Mitsubishi Galant, netting them $3,000.)
Donald Trump’s most conservative allies want to make it much harder for Americans to receive Medicaid. Their goals, as detailed in Project 2025, include adding lifetime caps to the program; reducing federal contributions; and further tightening eligibility standards so that people have to be even poorer to qualify.
What they don’t want you to know is that Medicaid is not just for the mythical undeserving poor; it’s a program that tens of millions of Americans have come to rely on. If you are lucky enough to live as long as my parents, who are now in their 80s, there’s a very decent chance that you will one day count yourself among their ranks. I believe that health care is a human right and that Medicaid is vital to securing that right. So I’m voting to protect it.
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