It’s official. Donald Trump and Mike Pence are the Republican nominees for president and vice president (as if we didn’t already know it was going to happen).
The Trump movement has been an unprecedented and historic campaign. The rhetoric from the campaign is unheard of and controversial to say the least. It’s not the first time we’ve heard things similarly controversial from a candidate, though. In the 1960s, George Wallace, a champion of segregation and racism ran for the Democratic nomination before being shot. In every year from 1976 until 2004, Lyndon LaRouche, who wanted nuclear war and predicted the apocalypse multiple times, ran for the Democratic nomination. In the early 1990s, Ross Perot ran on the Republican ticket. And then David Duke, former KKK Grand Wizard and Nazi, ran on the Democratic Ticket in 1988 and the Republican ticket in 1992.
American politics is no stranger to weirdos and extremists, but now, in July 2016, the Republican Party has nominated a candidate who believes that Muslims should be banned from the country, all Muslims currently residing in America should be put on a registry, all illegal immigrants should be deported, the U.S. should use military power to pressure China into better trade, the U.S. should kill the families of suspected terrorists and the U.S. should bring back torture techniques that are currently banned by the Geneva convention.
This is the first time that someone so brash and extreme has secured the nomination of a major party to become the leader of the free world.
But rather than talk about how this happened, which is certainly still a baffling question, I’ll answer why I, a former Bernie Sanders supporter and progressive liberal, will cast my vote for a woman whom I have campaigned against for more than a year.
There is a lot to be said about Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has flip-flopped on just about every policy under the dome of Capitol Hill and has been involved in several scandals (including her most recent email server scandal in which she stored classified information on a private server). She has supported trade policies that make liberals and conservatives alike slap their foreheads.
But there is one thing that has dramatically changed the trajectory of the Clinton campaign: Bernie Sanders.
More specifically, the enormous movement behind Bernie Sanders that is already electing progressives to the national Senate and House. This movement has forced Hillary Clinton to take her policies and move them more to the left instead of her typical centrist position.
Recently, she has promised to open a public option for Obamacare, and while it is not the road to universal healthcare that Sanders supporters were eager to begin, it is a start. This will tremendously help the disastrous fee currently imposed by the Affordable Care Act, which has already helped tens of millions of Americans gain health insurance.
Donald Trump wants to completely repeal Obamacare and “replace it with something else," which when we’re talking about the health and the well-being of hundreds of millions of Americans, could afford to be more specific.
Clinton wants to continue to fund public K–12 education, including elevating teaching positions as well as subsidizing the rebuilding of schools in rural and urban areas. She also wants to make community colleges tuition-free as well as implement a complex plan to lower costs for students who are parents.
Trump currently has no education positions other than “ending Common Core” on his website.
In fact, Hillary Clinton’s website includes 37 detailed positions on different issues, and Donald Trump’s website has 20 videos, the longest of which is 3:07 and discusses the Trump University scandal. The majority of the videos are about 40 seconds long, and of his policies that actually have script to them, there are exactly seven.
This is a recurring trend just between the two websites.
Another thing I mentioned earlier was the fact that more progressives are being elected to congress. In fact, 88 percent of Congress is up for re-election, and polls show Democrats sweeping the elections. If progressives can take Congress with a Democratic majority, then not only could we reform the Democratic Party, we could make sure progressive policies go through the white house.
If Hilary Clinton is president, then vetoing or opposing progressive bills implemented and supported by both houses of a blue congress would paint her as a false Democrat or as a lame duck, and would spell danger to her re-election.
What I’m saying is the political revolution is not over. Bernie Sanders may not be in the oval office, but there’s still a good chance he could gain a cabinet position alongside people like Elizabeth Warren and Tim Kaine.
So do I think Hillary Clinton is the messiah of America? Absolutely not. But with a dangerous extremist about to get his hands on the nuclear launch codes, two vacancies on the Supreme Court, a potential liberal congress that could reinvigorate American policy, it looks like she is the best bet.
