This week, everyone was consumed by and fussing over the presidential election.
Now that it's over, I think that we all need to do a better job informing ourselves for the next election, and for other elections.
This isn't to say that I'm not a Trump supporter, because that wouldn't be true. However, as a whole, this election brought a lot of things to my attention that I was not too pleased about.
Everyone was concerned about who is going to be taking care of our country for the next 4 years. However, this is all that people are focused on. People aren't thinking about Congress, or the House seats, or any other person who is in political power. People weren't thinking of these things when they were voting, only when the election was on TV.
The fact is that most of the Americans in this country are uninformed about the way our government works. It is also a fact that many Americans are uninformed about politics, in general.
A recent study showed that 29% of Americans cannot name the vice president, and while that doesn't seem like a big number, you have to take into consideration the population as a whole. Does that number suddenly seem much bigger to you? Are you now alarmed? Good, I hope so.
Studies have shown that when Americans exercise their right to vote, it is usually in the presidential election. Generally, a smaller percentage of Americans do their research when voting for Congress. When it comes down to it, Americans generally don't take their time to do the research.
With this presidential election as a prime example, the media feeds us a lot of the information that we base our vote off of. However, people need to understand that the media will publish what ever is possible to get them the most amount of views. Have you noticed how Donald Trump is all over every news headline that is broadcasted? He's on the news because they find him entertaining and he increases the number of views for the show.
Taking the time to do research on your candidates, not only for the presidency, is extremely important. The New York Times is a generally unbiased newspaper, and is what I would recommend using when researching information and news. If everyone were to take an hour out of the day to do quality research on our candidates, in theory, everyone could cast a vote that they believe best fits their values. Thus, the presidential candidate would truly reflect the majority.
In saying this, I would also like to touch on the fact that if you are a feminist, it is illogical to vote for someone just because they are a woman. For example, I know many people voted for Hillary Clinton on the basis that she is a woman, but in fact didn't know anything about her or what she wanted to do for the country. To go off of this, I also know people who voted for Donald Trump because they thought it was humorous. Wake up, America. Let's stop basing our votes off of silly things, and start basing them off of cold, hard facts.
