Three votes.
That is the margin that helped launch one of the most consequential political careers in modern Wisconsin state government.
In September 2010, Tyler August was a 27-year-old candidate running in a six-way Republican primary for an open seat in the Wisconsin State Assembly. When election night ended, it appeared he had lost. Adam Gibbs was reported ahead by four votes.
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Then came the recount.
When it was finished, August had won 1,760 votes to Gibbs’ 1,757.
Three votes. Out of more than 7,300 cast.
Fewer people than fit around most kitchen tables separated winning from losing.
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August went on to win the general election that November. Sixteen years later, he serves as majority leader of the Wisconsin State Assembly, one of the most powerful positions in state government.
Think about everything that had to pass through that three-vote doorway first.
Every vote he has cast in the legislature. Every bill he has introduced. Every budget he has helped shape. Every negotiation, committee assignment and leadership decision that came afterward. Every Wisconsin family, worker or business affected by legislation enacted during his time in office.
None of it happens the same way if that primary ends differently.
That is the part we tend to forget when we say our vote “doesn’t matter.”
We imagine elections as enormous things. Millions of people. Billions of dollars. Television ads, polling averages, consultants, candidates and endless political noise. Against all of that, one person standing in a voting booth can feel almost comically insignificant.
But elections are not actually decided by “the electorate.”
They are decided by individual people, one ballot at a time.
And my home state of Wisconsin offers a remarkable example of just how thin the distance between two outcomes can be.
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In the 2020 presidential election, more than 3.2 million Wisconsinites cast ballots. The final margin was 20,682 votes. Only Georgia and Arizona had narrower margins by percentage, with their presidential contests decided by just 11,779 and 10,457 votes, respectively.
Four years later, more than 3.4 million Wisconsinites voted, and the presidential margin was 29,397, making Wisconsin the closest state in the country by percentage of votes cast.
Those numbers sound large until you compare them with the millions of ballots cast.
Then there is Tyler August.
Three.
Wisconsin’s experience offers a lesson for voters across America: No election should be treated as a foregone conclusion.
And the consequences stretch far beyond which name appears on an office door.
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State and local governments across the country make decisions every year about taxes, regulations, housing, licensing, education, infrastructure, employment rules and the cost of doing business. Those decisions determine how easy it is to open a storefront, hire another employee, build a home, expand a farm or invest in a community.
Free enterprise does not exist separately from government policy. The rules government writes shape the environment in which people take risks, build businesses and create opportunity.
Which means the people who write those rules matter.
And the people who choose them matter too.
Voting is sometimes talked about as an expression of personal identity. Increasingly, politics itself feels that way. Pick a team, wear the jersey, argue about it online.
But a ballot is much more practical than that.
It is one of the few moments when every citizen gets the exact same unit of political power.
One person. One vote.
The business owner with 40 employees gets one. The college student voting for the first time gets one. The retiree who has voted in every election for 50 years gets one.
So does the person who nearly stays home because the weather is lousy, the line might be long, they have errands to run, or they assume everyone else will decide the outcome anyway.
The margin between having political power and never getting the opportunity to exercise it can be three people.
And somewhere in southeastern Wisconsin are voters who helped create that margin. They probably went home that night without feeling particularly powerful.
They were.
On Nov. 3, Americans across the country will make thousands of similarly unremarkable choices. Get up early or hit snooze. Stop at the polling place or drive past it. Return the absentee ballot or leave it sitting on the kitchen counter.
Most of us will never know precisely what depended on our decision.
That is the point.
Democracy asks us to participate before we know whether our vote will be one of the millions or one of the three.
Whether you live in Wisconsin or somewhere else in America, the first step is knowing when, where and how to vote. Check your registration status, find your polling place and make a plan for Nov. 3. Election information and registration requirements are available through your state or local election office.
So, vote for the candidates you believe will make your community, your state and your country stronger. Vote for the policies and principles you want represented in your state capital and Washington.
But vote.
Because somewhere in Wisconsin history are voters who helped create a three-vote margin, proving that the difference between “my vote probably won’t matter” and changing the direction of government can be almost impossibly small.
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They may never know who they were.
They showed up anyway.
