Oh, politics. It seems as if this current election season has dragged on and on and on. By the time many of you are reading this, we will have elected our next president and vice-president. We will also have spoken on who will control our government from the executive branch, all the way down to the local governments around the country. This has been a particularly contentious election season, and wherever you turn, it feels as if party lines have been drawn in the sand.

I was raised in a Republican household. I met President George W. Bush when I was eight years old, and I told him that I would be taking his job one day. As a kid, I dreamed of being the first female president of the United States of America. While I was planning my political future, it never occurred to me that I would ever cast a vote for a non-Republican. One I got older, I would watch politicians on one side or another, and I realized that I did not identify with either major political party. At this time, a teacher of mine explained her decision to be an unaffiliated voter. To me, it was an entirely foreign concept that someone could choose not to identify as either a Republican or a Democrat.

Once I got to college, I decided that I could no longer identify as a Republican. I also decided that I could not identify as a Democrat. I felt politically lost and confused. That first year, I took an introductory American politics class. During the first class, we took a test that would tell us where our political beliefs placed us in our current partisan system. The results came back that I could either choose to identify as an extremely liberal Republican, or an extremely conservative Democrat. After that test, I changed my voter registration to Unaffiliated. To me, the idea of just believing that I had to fall into this group and once I was in this group, I had to adopt an ‘Us vs. Them’ mentality, was absurd. I have never believed in voting for a straight ticket without logic or explanation. Just voting for a person based on their party affiliation seems ridiculous to me.

I get a lot of questions about why I chose to change my identification to Unaffiliated. These questions range from relative strangers asking, “Why not just pick a side?” to my parents’ lovely questioning of “How is it possible that we sent you to college as a liberal Republican and you are coming back to us a Yellow Dog Democrat?” In all honesty, yes, this election cycle it is no secret that I am leaning towards a more Democrat-heavy ticket. But that is what is so great about being an Unaffiliated voter. The next election, when I am choosing who to vote for, I get to pick my candidates based on who they are and what they are advocating for, not based on what political party they affiliate with. If we had a few more people in this country who were Unaffiliated, maybe our political system would not be so messed up and our government would work for ALLpeople.

I am proud of my choice to be an Unaffiliated voter. Regardless of whoever is elected on November the 8^th, we will all wake up on November the 9^th and figure out how to move on as a nation. Get out and vote. Vote for who you think is the best choice to lead. Don’t vote for a political party, think like an Unaffiliated voter and vote for the candidate you believe is right for the job.