Morin is a communications coordinator at Nonprofit VOTE with a primary focus on digital and social media for National Voter Registration Day.
With Election Day in the rearview mirror, it’s easy to assume we all have time to focus on things like gifts and Hallmark holiday specials while we put that whole “democracy” thing on the back burner until late next summer, right?
If you work in a nonprofit — especially one that serves low-income communities, communities of color or new citizens — your efforts to ensure that those underrepresented in our democracy have a say are never on the back burner. The work to sustain democracy is not seasonal, it is year-round and does not take breaks.
“It’s hard to overstate the important role that nonprofits play in fostering an inclusive democracy,” says Brian Miller, executive director of Nonprofit VOTE. “Whether it’s employing the natural ability of nonprofits to reach underrepresented communities or simply getting out the vote for the election of the local school board, the deeply rooted community presence of America’s nonprofits can light the fire of voter engagement from state to state.”
It’s that natural ability to close registration gaps that makes nonprofits so essential to building the infrastructure of grassroots democracy at the local level. It’s no secret that voters engaged by nonprofits are more likely to hit the polls. What's more important is that the phenomenon is magnified for historically underrepresented groups. Black, Hispanic, and Asian American and Pacific Islander voters who were engaged by nonprofits were 3, 5, and 6 percentage points more likely to vote than comparable voters not contacted by nonprofits. The proof is in the pudding.
It’s this nonprofit role in boosting turnout that we need to combat “off year” election voter apathy that reared its ugly head once again in 2021. While there was no shortage of ink spilled about the political horserace implications of this year’s state and local races, what garnered far less fanfare was the jaw-dropping plunge in voter participation all across the country. Even accounting for the post-presidential-election participation drop off that often plagues off-years, 2021’s sharp turnout declines, from Philadelphia to New Mexico’s Doña Ana County and from Colorado to New Jersey and its hotly contested gubernatorial race. were a dire warning of the risks of civic complacency.
Is this drop-off new? Of course not. But we don’t find it acceptable to write off one out of every four election cycles as a guaranteed dud. After a 2020 that saw seismic shifts in voter registration, rates of early and absentee voting, and civic activism, it can no longer be acceptable to see participation drops as high as 49 percent as business as usual for democracy in America.
What’s needed is “democracy maintenance:” the day-to-day upkeep of the basic component parts of a healthy democracy. In the same way that regular medical checkups help to avert larger problems, consistent and purposeful community voter engagement makes for a healthier body politic no matter the offices on the ballot in a given election year.
Nonprofits by their very nature are perfectly suited for year-round democracy maintenance, and it can take a virtually limitless number of forms. Here are just a few things your nonprofit can be doing right now:
- Engage leaders and candidates on your issues. Well-organized groups have a natural advantage at getting the ear of changemakers. Leverage your nonprofit’s space in the community to engage elected officials and candidates alike on the issues that matter to the populations you serve. Invite candidates to your organization and shine the light on your constituents as the human faces of policy decisions.
- Make the issues real. State and local politics impact our day-to-day lives far more immediately than the daily machinations in Washington — but you’d never know it by our collective hyper-focus on the big national races. Nonprofits speak the language of the communities and in doing so can serve as trusted translators of the direct connections between the workings of government and the needs of constituencies.
- Make your community voting experts. Turn your nonprofit into a centralized hub for all things voting. Devote your resources to demystifying the often hard-to-find information on the whens (election and primary dates), hows (early and absentee voting options), and wheres (polling places and ballot dropoff sites) of voting in your neck of the woods.
And that’s just the beginning! With roughly four months until the first handful of states head to the polls for their respective primaries and the 2022 midterms soon to follow, there’s no time like now for nonprofits to start mapping out the next 360-odd days of democracy maintenance and engaging their communities to ensure they are #VoteReady for the next election. And signing up for our Nonprofit VOTE newsletter is a great first step of the planning process.
So, by all means, enjoy your family gatherings, TV specials and any other year-end festivities that spark the joy you’ve absolutely earned. But just remember: Democracy doesn’t take a holiday just because you do.
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.