I know that there’s no shortage of posts about the election and most of my followers don’t know/care about me at all but I really need an outlet to express how I feel about the results.
I have never been more proud to be a democrat. I am not moderate and never will be, I’ll likely vote straight ballot until the day I die. But our party has serious issues that need to be fixed. A huge reason why we lost this election was because Hillary was unable to unite people. Not our country, not our party. Less democrats turned out to vote for Hillary than turned out to vote for Obama, which I believe is a result of (or at least related to in some way) a new fundemental problem with the way the united states holds elections. The reason why we have primaries is so that each party can chose a candidate that they actually want, but with the backwards and elitist creation of superdelegates, dems ended up with a candidate that we did not love as our own. Hillary was not my candidate. Qualified, intellegent, and historically impactful as she may be, she certainly wasn’t my first choice. Why did this elite group of people who are arguably corrupt themselves and blinded by their own privilege get to chose the candidate meant to rally the entire party?
I could write an entire book about my feels towards super delegates but that’s not what I intended to write about so I’m just gonna get straight to my point.
The beauty of democrats is that they are educated. This is something that I’m proud of, this is something that allows me to have faith in us as a whole. But we can’t let our education put us in a bubble. This leads me to the second thing that has compelled me to be a democrat throughout my life: how we stand for minorities’ rights and defend their civil liberties. As passionate as I am about defending minorities, until this election I was completely ignorant and dissmissive of the disenfranchisment of what is apparently a large majority of Americans. That silent majority that carried trump to victory, the white people in the rural fly-over states, feels left out of polotics because they are left out of polotics. When i reflect on Hillary’s campaign I now see the error of saying “any intelligent person will stand with her” “any person who knows what’s good for this country will vote for her.” We dismissed and neglected this large group of uneducated people living in middle america who are suffering so greatly from the recession, unemployment, and general advancements in technology. These people are losing their jobs, they’re struggling to feed their families, and they are ignored by the democratic party. As a democrat who now lives in the deep south I will be the first to admit that throughout this entire election I’ve written off the silent majority as racist, sexist, uneducated trash that deserves no voice in polotics. I was so wrong. This demographic is clearly motivated and desires to be involved in government. Establishment candidates like Hillary ignored them and that was a huge mistake. Sure, many Trump supporters are racist, xenophobic, homophobic, hateful poeple. But many are more than the bible-rifle-clinging hillbillies that they’re stereotyped to be. As democrats we shouldn’t be pushing these people away. We should be campaigning toward them, educating them, letting them know that we are going to do as much for them as we are for the elite, pacific north-western, rich, urban millenials and the disenfranchised minorities.
I just hope my party can learn from its mistakes. I have so much to say that it’s becoming unclear how to express it so I’ll just stop here. But i love America so much and the fact that there are politicians out there that support my ideas (bernie etc.) makes me so happy. We may not be on top now but so long as we make changes to the course we’re currently on (towards establishment and elitism) i know the democratic party will rise again. Also i love you obama and i am so proud of everything you’ve done for this country. We are so #blessed to have grown up with the best dem president since LBJ. <3
