Lori Falce: It’s stressful being a swing state voter

I’m a little tired of being so important.

That’s an understatement. I’m almost exhausted. I’m exhausted. I’m at the end of my knowledge.

And I know that I’m not alone. You’re tired too, right?

In Pennsylvania, we are used to always having a solid place in presidential elections. We understand it. We are the homecoming queen. Our milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. And by milkshake, of course, we mean electoral votes, and by boys, of course, we mean presidential candidates.

But come on, guys. We’re drowning here.

Every day brings another visit from Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or Vice Presidents JD Vance and Tim Walz. Sometimes they come in pairs. Sometimes they come alone. Sometimes there are surrogates like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., or U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla. Sometimes you have Republicans at one end of the state and Democrats at the other.

It’s just, well… it’s a lot.

I have a friend from New York who enjoys being ignored. She has enough to deal with – her mayor has been indicted.

My family in Ohio lives just a stone’s throw from Springfield, so they are enduring their own election-related trauma.

That goes for my Minnesota team, too, because Walz has inspired everyone to pay attention to the Land of 10,000 Lakes for the first time since Walter Mondale took on Ronald Reagan. Just for the record: yes, we eat hot meals and no, we are not that polite. “Minnesota nice” is like a southern woman saying, “Bless your heart.” It’s a fist in a kid glove.

Sometimes I romanticize what it must be like to live in a state that is firmly anchored in one pillar or another. What’s it like not switching from party to party in an election year? What would it be like to live in Alabama or California? Sure, Alabama went for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and California was red in the days of Richard Nixon and Reagan. But not anymore.

What if a presidential election visit is an anomaly? What if, in the final month of the race, the parties decide not to waste advertising dollars in their markets because everyone knows what the outcome will be?

But then my friend got to the point.

“There are good things about my vote not being counted at all.”

That’s the compromise. No one represents voters in party strongholds like Arkansas and Hawaii. Sure, there may be brief stops in Idaho and Vermont, but not a full-scale push to change hearts and minds. People care about Iowa and New Hampshire in the primaries; Because of convention, they are all but forgotten.

In Pennsylvania, every vote counts. Not in the after-school schoolhouse rock kind of way. Yes, every vote counts in every election every year. But when it comes to election calculations, it’s easy to get discouraged if you’re not in one of the seven states where vote counting will make all the difference.

And as more than one pundit has pointed out, the Keystone State is the Holy Grail of elections.

That’s why the candidates and their representatives are here. This is why we are drowning in news on television, streaming services, and radio because of advertising dollars. It’s everywhere and we still have a month of it to go.

This is the price we pay for likely making the final decision on Election Day. We are actually that important.

But it’s still tiring.