Spillane serves as Senior Advisor to Power the Polls and Director of the Civic Responsibility Project.
As our country celebrates Women’s History Month and looks ahead to local elections this fall, it’s important for us to celebrate the everyday heroines in communities across the country who are the essential workers of our democracy: poll workers.
In recent years, new challenges have tested these workers—from the COVID-19 pandemic to concerns around the threat of violence—but poll workers have continued to show up and ensure that everyone in their communities has an opportunity to make their voice heard in our democracy.
I know how critical their work is through my role at Power the Polls, a nonpartisan initiative that was founded early in the COVID-19 pandemic to recruit more poll workers. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Power the Polls recruited over 275,000 potential poll workers and coordinated with Secretaries of State and local elections officials from both sides of the aisle to fill anticipated gaps in local municipalities. Over half of the people who raised their hands to work the polls were women. Although the next election on many people’s minds isn’t until 2024, critical local elections are taking place this year, and we can’t slow down efforts to invest in and strengthen our democratic infrastructure, including recruiting more poll workers.
In June of 2020, we launched Power the Polls to respond to the widespread concerns over a potential poll worker shortage due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We set out to recruit a new generation of younger, more diverse poll workers to ensure that every polling site was adequately staffed and to build a future where poll workers reflect the communities they serve.
Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, many feared a potential poll worker shortage for a different reason: threats to poll workers, like this one in Georgia, after the 2020 election. Yet people—especially women—stepped up. In fact, polling places across the U.S. are overwhelmingly overseen by women. Despite initial concerns, the 2022 election ran smoothly, thanks in part to the hard work and dedication of poll workers.
Not only have these new poll workers pushed through challenges in recent years, but they also overwhelmingly found their experience to be rewarding and have expressed excitement about working again in the future. A new survey of people who signed up through Power the Polls shows that 88 percent said they’d be interested in working in future elections. Additionally, 95 percent of survey respondents reported satisfaction in their work.
The 2020 and 2022 elections have shown us how critical poll workers are to keeping our democracy running—and we need to make sure we continue to recruit a new generation of poll workers for elections to come, including women, young people, people of color, and others who have historically been underrepresented among poll workers.
Poll workers are the essential workers of our democracy. Every year, we rely on the time and energy of poll workers in our local communities to staff elections. While we’ve made progress in recruiting a new wave of younger poll workers, the average age of poll workers remains over 60. In some states, poll workers can serve as young as 16, and we’ve seen teens sign up through Power the Polls to serve their communities before they can even cast their own ballots, setting them up for a lifetime of civic engagement.
While important strides have been made through our recruitment, we all must do more in future election cycles to ensure that poll workers better reflect the communities they serve, including across age, race, and gender. Between now and 2024, Power the Polls will continue this work. We will support election officials managing local elections, and we will continue to promote civic engagement, voting, and serving as a poll worker as lifelong commitments—not just something for big election years.
Women’s History Month is an exciting time to uplift the contributions of women—and a reminder that we can, and should, be celebrating women’s contributions throughout the rest of the year as well. Similarly, promoting civic engagement isn’t just for big election years. There may be years with fewer elections, yes, but our commitment to supporting election administrators, recruiting poll workers, and building a thriving democracy must be ongoing and steadfast.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.