Our Founding Fathers designed government to be small. Out of our way. Limited in all respects.
They planned for government to build roads, arrest criminals, guard our borders, and leave us alone.
So when we went to vote on Election Day, the questions on our minds might be similarly distant. With government encroaching on our lives so little, we could think of elections as a philosophical exercise, most of the time.
Do we like John Adams’ approach more or less than we like Thomas Jefferson’s? James Madison’s demeanor more or less than Charles Cotesworth Pinkney’s?
Those days, sadly, are long behind us.
We still have some of those feelings; it’s been ingrained in our DNA for centuries. So we do still approach elections as if we’re choosing who we like more, who impresses us more, who seems to be a more eloquent speaker, a more personable guy glad-handing supporters at state fair, a more approachable conversationalist at a diner in Iowa or New Hampshire.
But we shouldn’t be thinking that way anymore, because the nature of our government has changed so much. We now need to think first and foremost of how the vote will affect us personally, and how it will affect those we love.
What will this election mean for the safety of our schools, apartment buildings, neighborhoods? What will this election do to the job security of our own careers, the career options for our children, the financial well-being of our grandchildren to come? What will this election mean to the availability of heat and air conditioning, food and water, and other choices in our lives?
Gasoline and Diesel Pricing and Availability:
When modern Democrats are in office, they slow-walk or shut down permitting for oil exploration and drilling; when Republicans are in office, they encourage and facilitate oil production.
But those are things that can be flipped on and off relatively quickly. The bigger difference is that when Democrats are in office, they shut down refineries and make it impossible to build new ones; they ban oil pipelines and reduce storage capacity. Republicans favor refineries and pipelines, but these take years to construct from scratch. Ninety refineries have been shut down in the USA since 1990. Ninety!
No matter how much you drill, if it’s costly to transport it and if there’s no place to refine it, gasoline and diesel will be scarce and prohibitively priced.
The Electric Grid:
The modern world runs on energy. The cost, dependability, and availability of electricity determines everything from home comfort to hospital and nursing home function, from the lighting and cooling at retail shopping malls to the manufacturing capacity of our factories. Wherever modern Democrats gain political power, they shut down efficient power plants (nuclear, natural gas, coal and oil) and they mandate the use of inefficient power sources instead (windmill farms and solar panel farms), resulting in both massive cost increases and unprecedented blackouts.
Thousands of acres of costly windmills and solar panels are destroyed after hurricanes and hailstorms; nuclear and coal plants are designed to survive such weather events with minimal disruption. For many facilities, blackouts are literally fatal: Food processing plants and cold storage warehouses, hospitals and nursing homes are jeopardized – this means human lives are jeopardized – by this suicidal dependence on undependable power sources.
Life itself is becoming unaffordable in numerous states because of this continual Democrat party sabotage of our nation’s electric grid.
The Welfare State:
There was a time when, if you worked hard enough, you could provide for your family without ever relying on any government programs. No more.
Today, certain aspects of our lives are dependent on government programs by design. Most schools for our children, most healthcare not just for the poor but also for our seniors, even much of our nation’s housing, are now dominated by government programs.
Even transportation, in a nation in which automobile ownership is almost universal, is heavily affected by the public transportation programs of our cities, where buses and commuter rail dominate the commute for rich and poor commuters alike.
It’s not just a matter of whether the programs are run well or poorly; other government decisions impact whether these programs are even remotely manageable at all. One key Democrat choice – to allow tens of millions of illegal aliens to flood the country in recent years – has singlehandedly overwhelmed all of these systems. We have shortages in healthcare services and housing availability. We have subways that are unsafe because the cities can’t afford to police them. We have schools that are useless, because no teacher can teach in a room in which a dozen different languages are spoken.
All these programs have gone to hell because of the flood of tens of millions of utterly unassimilable third worlders. Even the most committed and well-intentioned programs cannot survive the suicidal “sanctuary” policies of the Democrats.
Crime and Punishment:
This brings us to the existential question of whether to tolerate crime or to fight it. Republican policy is to arrest and prosecute every criminal, from rape and robbery to drug dealing and murder. Democrat policy is to write off whole categories of crimes, and even of perpetrators, as being too unimportant or protected to arrest, let alone punish.
Republican policy calls for stiff sentencing to remove perpetrators from the community as early as possible; modern Democrat policy calls for compassion for every criminal, the virtual emptying of prisons and the severe reduction and emasculation of police forces, even at a time when crime is on the rise.
In short, modern Democrat policy sides with the criminal, while Republican policy not only sides with the victim, but attempts to reduce future opportunities to be victimized.
Business and Jobs:
For generations, the Democrat fondness for business taxes and regulations crippled American manufacturing. Throughout much of that period, the divided loyalties of Republicans (between small business and big business) left the Democrats with free reign to drive manufacturing abroad, gradually destroying domestic opportunities.
The Trump era has largely reformed the Republican party in this regard, returning the GOP to its traditional support of the American worker, reforming federal tax and regulatory policies and returning a reasoned protectionist bent to our global trade policy. This approach is both attracting trillions in foreign investment to build new factories here, and inspiring and enabling home-grown American entrepreneurship as well.
Republican policies are creating the jobs and opportunities of the future for generations to come, while Democrat policies would continue the old approach of driving them abroad and leaving us unemployed and unemployable at home.
This Time, It’s Personal.
We aren’t just voting in these midterms over which candidates are better looking, more exciting, more likely to “want to sit down and have a beer with.”
More now than ever before, the choices on our ballots are about the kind of communities we live in, whether we can afford the American Dream or not, whether our children will be safe walking to school or moving to a college dorm, whether our grandchildren will have jobs at all, or be stuck in ghettos of institutional poverty.
It’s not about the individuals on the ballot anymore; the parties vote as a block now. This is about our own safety, our children’s well-being, our community’s future.
May Divine Providence guide our decisions this Election Day.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” and his brand new collection of stories about the heroes of the American Founding, “The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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