As a poll worker, I encountered hundreds of people during early voting: classmates, friends, some of my professors, Duke students voting for the first time, a young Chilean girl who couldn’t vote but begged to peek inside and a guy who walked in utterly confused and blurted out, “Biden dropped out? When was this?” One voter even marked every bubble on the ballot. (I later explained to him that you could only vote for one presidential candidate.)
While working, I couldn’t help but peek at their political affiliation. In fact, I found myself almost unconsciously assuming their political party even before looking up their registrations. My partisan arithmetic went something like this: white guy + mid-60s + Army veteran cap = Republican. Brunette girl + round tortoiseshell glasses + beige cardigan = Democrat. When a young woman in a baby blue Prius pulled into the parking lot, I proceeded with the same mental arithmetic: young woman + baby blue Prius + … Wait — Trump 2024 bumper sticker? That equation didn’t quite add up.
My mistake? I was using social identities to predict political ones. And that only goes so far. In reality, many of our identities are arbitrary and, at times, seemingly irrational. As a Duke student, for instance, your unwavering loyalty to Duke basketball and unwarranted hatred of UNC seem instinctive. But what if you had gone to UNC instead? Chances are you’d feel differently.
A similar paradox encapsulates many of our other identities. Take sports teams and hometowns, for example. I grew up in the Bay Area. Naturally, I love the Warriors, hate the Lakers and will refute anyone who criticizes San Francisco. But if I had been raised in LA, I’m sure my allegiances would flip completely.
While political beliefs aren’t entirely akin, I can’t help but wonder how much of our ideology is shaped by chance, by circumstance. If I had grown up in a different environment with a different family and experiences, would that change the way I vote? It’s highly likely, yes.
As Ezra Klein notes in “Why We’re Polarized,” “our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities.” In “Uncivil Agreement,” Lilliana Mason adds that a “single vote can now indicate a person’s partisan preference as well as his or her religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood, and favorite grocery store.” While I agree that, in many cases, our social identities do align with — and may influence — our political ones, assuming a neat overlap is an oversimplification. The 2024 election alone proves otherwise: Trump outperformed expectations with key demographics, improving his margins among young voters, women and voters of color as compared to his 2020 campaign. Classifying voters with clear-cut partisan labels misses this nuance. People are not monolithic.
I realized this on election night. It was nearing 7 p.m., and voter turnout had slowed. My coworker, Mack, and I sat outside the polling station, waiting for any last-minute voters. He told me about growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, how his father worked on the Manhattan Project and stories from his time stationed in Japan. Once again, I began my mental arithmetic: white man + late-70s + veteran + Tennessee… I glanced at him, wondering if he was making the same calculations for me: 19-year-old girl + California + college student. But instead, to my surprise, he was entirely fixated on the night sky. He turned to me and asked, “Can you tell if the moon is waxing or waning?”
My mind went blank. Something about his question — maybe just the sheer simplicity of it — completely caught me off guard. That’s when I stopped calculating. It didn’t matter whether he voted red, blue, green or somewhere in between. I knew I didn’t need an answer to my equation anymore.
I once assumed my “math” would always yield the correct result, but now, I realize my equations were not only flawed — they were also myopic. People are so much more colorful than the red and blue boxes I tried to cram them in.
My perspective began to shift once I replaced “or” with “and.” If a hyphen between “Asian” and “American” grants me both identities, why do these hyphens start disappearing when it comes to our political identities? What about socially progressive and fiscally conservative voters? Gun-owning, God-fearing Democrats? Baby-blue-Prius-driving Trump supporters? And what about the people who want to vote for every candidate on the ballot? (I’ll make my case for ranked-choice voting on a different day.) We often view identities as contradictory when, in many cases, they are interdependent. Moving beyond the political binary requires acknowledging the “ands” within us. We are all more multifaceted than the two-party system permits.
I’ll admit, sometimes, I still slip back into my habitual partisan arithmetic. We all do. It’s almost automatic. In those moments, however, we must remind ourselves that our calculations are mere assumptions — ones that pull us apart from each other. When we calculate, or rather, miscalculate, we assume we already know everything about a person. We overlook their complexities. We dismiss their stories. In the end, we only miss out on one of the most profound interpersonal opportunities — the opportunity to truly understand someone.
When I stopped calculating and actually started listening to Mack, something changed. Our shared humanity transcended red and blue binaries. In my mind, we weren’t just a veteran and a college student, a Tennessean and a Californian. We were just two people, heads tilted upward, studying the night sky.
The truth is, when the day ends, we are all gazing at the same moon. And perhaps, that is enough commonality.
Jasmine Fan is a Trinity sophomore.
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