Your vote didn’t matter and that’s why we need a smaller government

On Tuesday, 120 million Americans voted, and Donald Trump won. But the link between a vote cast for Trump and his election is correlational: for the average American, nothing we did had an impact on the election. 

The fact is that, in a national election, your vote doesn’t matter. 

If you live in one of the 39 non-swing states in the United States, your vote had no impact. If you live in Alabama, it doesn’t matter if you voted for Clinton; your electoral votes went to Trump.

Even in swing states, economist Bryan Caplan shows that your vote is unlikely to matter because your single vote only affects the outcome if it’s a tie. Let’s look at Florida, considered the most important state of this election. 

Fivethirtyeight.com gave Mr. Trump a 50.3 percent chance of winning Florida. Given this, the average voting Floridian had a less than 1 in 10^69 (that’s 1 followed by 69 0’s) chance of deciding who won Florida. To put that in perspective, it’s much less likely than the odds of getting struck by lightning the very moment one opens a winning Powerball ticket. 

For the average American, nothing we do will affect a national election. If we donate $100 to our candidate, it may bring in 1-2 additional votes. If we volunteer 20 hours, we might earn them another 10-15 votes. Neither of these activities is going to shape the election.

Americans tend to trust government because we assume that it’s, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The quote attributed to Barney Frank sums it up: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” 

It’s a lot easier to trust and champion big government if you assume that government is something that we all have a say in. But the fact is that, as an individual, your say is so miniscule that it doesn’t matter. The federal government will pass new laws and regulations regardless of what you want. 

Many people accept this but argue that votes still matter in the aggregate. It’s true that, if 100,000 more people had voted for Clinton in a swing state like Pennsylvania, that could have had a big impact. But most of us don’t control 100,000 votes. Government is actually responsive to the kinds of people who can deliver thousands of votes (union bosses, heads of SuperPACs), but this is very different from being responsible to the average voter. We trust an institution that’s not accountable to us.

By contrast, many Americans tend to distrust the market because we assume it doesn’t respond to our individual desires. Just like our faith in government, this is backwards. Even big corporations are very responsive to consumer pressure, which is one reason protests work. In the 1990s, when people protested Nike’s use of child labor and sweatshops, then-CEO Phil Knight publicly changed course. Nike cracked down on sweatshops and increased the minimum age of workers.

Companies depend on our money for their livelihood, and we vote with our wallet multiple times every day. If I want to support natural foods, I can shop at Whole Foods rather than Walmart. My dollars have a non-negligible impact on which of those companies grows and which shrinks. Every day, I choose the kind of world I want to live in by “voting” for a certain cellular service, a certain restaurant, a certain shoe maker, a certain grocer.

The market puts each of us in the driver’s seat: every day we can vote with our dollars, and each vote matters a lot. By contrast, politics pushes us into the passenger seat and most often the driver doesn’t care what we want. 

If we really want a society responsive to the people, we need smaller government and free markets.

Julian Adorney is a Young Voices Advocate and a Thorpe Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. He’s written for a number of outlets, including the Federalist, the Hill, FEE, and Lawrence Reed’s latest anthology Excuse Me, Professor.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.