some take-aways from this election
1. if you voted third party, this is your fault. don’t convince yourself otherwise. you can talk about all the millions of disenfranchised felons who aren’t allowed to vote (and i’d be happy to discuss it with you at length some other time, because it’s an important issue), but it doesn’t change the fact that if you’d just voted for hillary, the CLEARLY better candidate, she would’ve won. by a lot. for some context: i voted for gary johnson in 2012 because i legitimately did not see a difference between romney and obama. this is another issue i’d be willing to discuss at length, but for now, i will say this: the difference between clinton and trump was much, much larger than the difference between romney and obama. only one of the major-party candidates nominated this year has any political experience, only one of them can be persuaded by reason, and only one of them has a strong record of being able to work with congress. the other one is a racist who wants to ban an entire religion and has been accused of sexual assault by 10 women. there’s no such thing as a perfect candidate; there will always be people who wished the nominee from their party was somebody different. but if you couldn’t figure out who the “lesser of two evils” was in this election, then you’re actually as dumb as you secretly worry you are. hopefully you remember this in four years, when we nominate a democrat to run against trump but he/she isn’t the exact candidate you were hoping for.
2. if you’ve been endlessly talking shit about hillary for the past six months, this is your fault too. if you wanted bernie as the nominee and spent the entire democratic primary slamming hillary, that’s FINE and i COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND. what is not fine and not completely understandable is continuing to trash her like that after she won the nomination. hillary has her own serious issues, and i would’ve been thrilled if the democratic party started having a conversation about those issues the day after the election. but corrupt and flawed as she is, she was the only chance of keeping trump out of the white house. if you didn’t get behind her as the obviously better candidate and instead spent the past six months slinging shit at her, then it doesn’t matter if you voted for her: this is your fault, too. to be clear: hillary is not my ideal candidate. i’m not even all that liberal–i own a gun and i vote republican probably 35% of the time. if she’d won this year and a normal, sane republican had run against her in 2020, i might not have voted to re-elect her. but this year, she was the only sane candidate running, and if you didn’t see the importance of getting her to the white house and keeping trump out, then this is your fault.
3. stop telling people their vote doesn’t count. seriously, just stop doing it. stop acting like staying home on election day is cool and edgy, because it’s not. it’s not some kind of political statement, it’s just fucking stupid and you’re not doing anything but enabling a dictatorship. i’m not going to sit here and pretend that your one vote will ever make a difference in a presidential election–statistically speaking, it’s almost impossible. but if you open your fat mouth to enough people and convince them to stay home, then we start to have a fucking problem. so if you can’t take five minutes out of your day once every four years to go to your fucking polling place, at least keep your mouth shut about it. getting to choose the leader of the country you live in and not have the government intervene in it is a privilege that a lot of people in this world don’t have. have an ounce of appreciation for it.
4. the electoral college is the stupidest bullshit in the world. as of right now, it looks like hillary is going to win the popular vote. but we’re going to get President Trump because of a system we set up 250 years ago to appease slave states. it’s fucked up. but that is NOT an excuse to stay home on election day. if you hate the electoral college, work to change it. get involved in the political process: become a community activist, do volunteer work, run for office yourself, start a damn letter writing campaign. if you don’t like the way we vote, get MORE involved. find MORE ways to make your voice heard. don’t just sit around and do nothing.
5. if you’re white, stand up for your minority friends. if this election did any good at all, it exposed that the united states is not a post-racial country by any stretch of the imagination. our first black president produced such a strong backlash among white that we ended up with trump as our next president. for the next few years, do whatever you can to protect your minority friends and show the rest of the world that this isn’t who we really are.