Flashback to exactly one year ago. The Cubs were yet to win another World Series, Kim Kardashian was yet to expose Taylor Swift via Snapchat and I was still just a senior in high school. My mind was on prom, graduation, prom, going far far away for college, prom - oh, and prom. The 2016 presidential election seemed ages away.
I began campaigning for Bernie Sanders that fall, volunteering at local Panera phonathons and driving a couple hours south of the Chicagoland area to attend rallies. In my government class, I assumed the role of the crazy liberal girl. I corrected people when they called Sanders a Communist instead of a Democratic Socialist. I could explain the difference between the two as well, but no one seemed to care. The individuals who accused me of only supporting Bernie for ‘woke’ Twitter retweets are the same ones retweeting them today. They are the same people who could care less about their country’s future, the ones who post “god damn, everyone is being so fucking annoying about this election :(“ without stopping to think - yes, yes this will affect me, this will affect everyone I know. But no, I was the crazy liberal girl who didn’t know what she was talking about.
My dad drove me to vote in my very first primary earlier this year. Well actually, I missed voter registration but he took me to the County Clerk’s office in Waukegan and I was able to get an early voting slip. I brandished my card proudly before him, happy dance and all, and he smiled just a little bit, his faint mustache rising at the corners. I took that as my cue and I told him mischievously, ‘When Bernie Sanders becomes President, you owe me $50.’ My parents were Hillary Clinton supporters. He mimicked slapping me across the face with the magazine he was holding. I laughed and took it a step further: ‘Who do you think will win?’
‘The primary?’
‘No, the presidency.’ My dad thought about it as I returned my ballot to the lady sitting at the counter.
As we headed back to the car, he turned to me finally, and said: ‘Trump.’
The monosyllabic bluntness of the word caught me off guard. I peered at him sideways from the passenger seat. My dad was never much of a political guy. Coming from a politically indifferent family, my sister and I disrupted the peaceful moderate-ness with our liberal mindsets, but my dad was planted firmly in the middle. Sometimes people are in the middle because they don’t care enough to look at both sides - well my dad did care. He watched hours of Chinese commentators debating American politics. He would come home after a long day at work, weariness settled in the lines of his clothes, and we would argue about single-payer healthcare. I asked him why he said Trump.
‘Because… he’s what the white people want. And white people usually get what they want.’
When it became clear that Donald Trump was going to clinch the presidency this past Tuesday night, my anxiety-ridden 1-am-sleep-deprived mind wandered back to this conversation between my father and I.
I remember being annoyed and telling him it was 2016 and race shouldn’t matter and the majority of people were much more liberal nowadays and all these other falsehoods that the media and my privileged little bubble fed to me. I hadn’t thought about the hundreds of millions of disgruntled white people across the nation, fettering in their own political crises. I was completely wrong and he was right. I was naive and he was not.
Donald J. Trump, the president-elect of the United States. Percentage of non-college white male voters who casted their ballot for Trump: 72%. Percentage of non-college white females: 62%. Whites in total: 58%
Non-whites: 21%
African Americans: 8%. Hispanics: 26%. Asian Americans: 19%.
Let the statistics speak for themselves.
- Crazy Liberal Girl
