We have made it to the year 2020 and it has been exactly 100 years since women have gained the right to vote in this country. In those hundred years, men have dominated each of the presidential races and have won 100% of them. As a female and a Democrat, I surely thought that we would reach a point in time, especially after Trump took office, where our country would realize that we need a woman in office to offset everything that has happened in the past three and a half years and also everything we as a country have done to oppress minorities.
Unfortunately, an intersectional perspective on government is ideal, however; when it comes down to preferences, we as a country historically tend to trust our vote to white men.
Psychologically, this makes sense. For many generations, we’ve seen men as the leaders. We tend to believe that they are smart, capable, and able to lead by nature – we especially tend to believe this in regard to white men. When Americans, particularly of the Caucasian variety, see people of color in positions of leadership, there is a part of them that feels uncomfortable.
People tend to vote for who they think best represents them – this is why people often vote for people who look like them, without first considering the experience or the plans that the candidate has to offer. This is exactly why it wasn’t long into the presidential race before candidates of color such as Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Julian Castro, and most recently Andrew Yang, had to take themselves out of the race due to lack of funding and support.
So now who are the front runners? White men.
According to a recent poll by the New York Times, Bernie Sanders is the front runner in the race for the Democratic nomination, with Joe Biden in second. Both are polling 9-10% ahead of Elizabeth Warren. Pete Buttigieg recently just won the Iowa Caucus, while Sanders won the New Hampshire primary. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar’s odds, thus far, have not been in their favor.
I have been a fellow for the Warren campaign for several months now, and I’ve been outspoken about Warren to many of my peers at SNU. I have taken notice that often, when I would talk about Warren to other people, the young men I would speak to would always compare her to Hillary Clinton.
These comparisons never had anything to do with policy or experience, but rather their level of likeability. It is no secret that Clinton was not likable by some people’s standards. She had a reputation for being an elitist Democrat, who would often say whatever the public wanted to hear – a true politician. This is a woman whose accent would change based on where she was campaigning, which was obviously a poor campaign strategy. The two are so different, despite their demographic, that I do not respect the comparison. Warren has never accepted corporate money and has never had a super PAC. Nor has she ever needed one because all of her campaigns are fully funded by her individual supporters. She has stood up in congress for people of color against Jeff Sessions and was kicked out for her protest of an openly racist individual who, at the time, was being accepted as the United States attorney general. Warren fought tooth and nail against banks and credit card companies in order to save families from falling into bankruptcy – and even proposed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a means of preventing Americans from falling into this kind of crippling debt.
The only reason someone would compare Warren to Clinton is simple: They are both old women. And why would young men vote for an old woman when they can vote for Bernie Sanders?
This brings me to the “Bernie Bros,” a group of Bernie supports/internet trolls who bully other candidates and their supporters online. According to a recent New York Times interview with former legislator Bakari Sellers, a former supporter of Kamala Harris, “You have to be very cognizant when you say anything critical of Bernie online. You might have to put your phone down. There’s going to be a blowback, and it could be sexist, racist and vile.” This, to me, sounds a lot like someone else’s supporters that we all know.
It is from my own perspective, after watching the 2016 and 2020 election cycles unfold, that because the field has become more diverse, many of Sanders supporters have sought out more diverse candidates and therefore left him with a group of “Bernie Bros,” which speaks for itself.
This is why I conducted a recent Instagram poll. The question was: Who would you rather vote for? The options were Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Of those participants 63% voted for Sanders – mostly men. Interestingly enough, 100% of those who chose Warren were women. Warren had zero support from men. This isn’t to say that people should vote for Warren just because she is a woman, but it is far worse not to vote for Warren because she is a woman.
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