Too Young to Matter

Too Young to Vote, Old Enough to Care

AKA: A POLITICAL JUNKIE IN TRAINING

By Isabel Engel

I used to wish my parents had forged the date on my birth certificate. Or at the very least, I’d been born two weeks earlier. 

As an avid political junkie and resident of the Washington, D.C. suburbs, I knew early on when I’d be able to cast my first vote in a presidential election. I remember the moment vividly: when my sixth grade classmates and I sat in our school’s  library, looking up the election dates on the desktop and comparing when we’d be able to enter the ballot booth ‘for real’ for the first time. 

Middle-school-me was crushed when she realized she wouldn’t be able to vote in the 2020 presidential election. I would miss the cut-off by three weeks. Born on November 22, 2002, I would be seventeen years, eleven months, and twelve days old when the 2020 election would take place on November 3, 2020. So close, yet so far from being eighteen. 

What sixth-grade Isabel didn’t realize, however, was that the November 2020 election would be among the most important of her lifetime. And missing out on the vote – amidst all of the political turmoil of the 2020 election season – would leave her feeling utterly powerless. 

***

Living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area during any election season is a wild experience. Political posters pervade the streets, protests strike the capital on a weekly basis, and, in my case, the news is always on in the living room. 

Originally, we expected the 2020 election season to be no different than years past. I’d pass candidates’ signs on the way to school, see political bumper stickers on cars in my school’s parking lot, and see the New York Times’ political coverage on my peers' split computer screens during class. 

However, as then-President Donald Trump’s tenure in office became all the more tumultuous and nominee Joe Biden sought to carry the Democratic party back to the White House, I soon became acutely aware that this election season would be unlike any other I’d witnessed in Washington. 

And I still couldn’t vote. 

***

The night of November 3, I waited anxiously on my couch as the votes came in. 

I’d gone to the polls with my dad, as I did every election year, and watched him cast a vote. I got the shiny little “I Voted” sticker they handed out to all voters and their children, as I always did. This year, though, wearing the sticker felt inauthentic. I hadn’t voted, as much as I wished I could’ve. 

So, as I watched the TV screen, feeling the most voiceless I’ve ever felt. There was nothing I could do about the upcoming election outcome. Literally nothing. 

Maryland went blue – to no one’s surprise – and D.C. did, too. Alabama and Tennessee went red. Then came the swing states. Ohio went red, as did Florida. Pennsylvania and Virginia went blue. 

It all came down to Georgia and Arizona. 

***

My friends and I all expected that life in D.C. would calm down once the election had been called. Boy were we wrong. 

Never had there been a more tumultuous time to live in Washington, D.C – a period that will undoubtedly be in future textbooks. As claims of election fraud pervaded news headlines and social media platforms, and the very foundation of our democracy and electoral practices were questioned, I began to realize that this election – and, with it, the days between November 3 and January 6  – was about so much more than one vote. This election season was about the very ideals that define our nation and its governance. 

***

On January 6, 2024, I turned on my TV. 

“Oh, my God.”

I ran to my parent’s bedroom to wake my mom up from a nap. 

“Turn on the news. They’re  storming the capital,” I explained as I shook my mom awake from her midday snooze. 

We sat together, on her bed and watched the chaos unfold. Flags with racist and antisemitic rhetoric waved in front of the CNN cameras. American flag paraphernalia swarmed the television screen. Reporters stood nervously at a distance from the Capitol, narrating the terror as it happened. 

“We’ve got to call dad. He has to come home. I don’t want him in the city at a time like this.”

My mom picked up her phone: “Marc, you’ve got to come home … What do you mean why? … Turn on the news.”

***

In the days that followed January 6, 2021, D.C. was a shell of its former self. 

Schools remained virtual and many, including my own, planned to cancel classes on the day of the Inauguration. When classes resumed in an in-person format, whispers filled the halls, as students expressed concerns for their city, their peers, and the parents of classmates who worked on the Hill. 

Inauguration day came and went – with the security on high alert. I, of course, wasn’t allowed to go downtown. None of my friends were. The city – particularly its Capitol Hill region – was off-limits.

As January 2021 came to a close, it became clear to me that my concerns in November – whether or not I’d been able to cast a vote, who’d win the presidency, and what would the makeup of Congress look like – were null in comparison to what the city had experienced in the months since. 

The days preceding and following January 6 changed our city. And they changed its people. 

***

I cast my first vote on November 8, 2022 in Houston Hall on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus. Now a college student, I got my shiny little “I Voted” sticker and put it on my black puffer jacket. 

This time, as I exited the ballot booth, I prayed. I prayed that this election wouldn’t end up like the last one I’d witnessed on my mom’s television set.