By Ameara Ditsche
Staff Writer
I remember being 15 and 16, clad in a “Feel the Bern” sweater and wishing I was a few years older so I could cast a vote for the progressive politician. I urged every adult I could to vote for him. He was the “cool” candidate.
He stood up for all the policies I believed in and promised valuable things to young people, like free tuition and a better future. Sanders has officially announced his 2020 run, an event that 2016 me was excited for yet 2019 me is not as jubilant as expected.
Sanders has some ideas for things that would happen if the state of our nation was ideal, but they are just that, ideal. His agenda for presidency is more of a personal one, it is a list of things that he would add to the country. He hasn’t very publicly displayed plans to fix ongoing issues. He speaks about the issues and has a role in them garnering publicity but doesn’t quite back them with set in stone plans.
For example, the Flint Water Crisis; Sanders has mentioned that it is a huge issue and even gone so far as to visit Flint, Michigan. However, he hasn’t expressed desire to allocate the funds necessary to fix the issue.
Possibly the biggest reason I don’t see myself voting for Sanders, is because I predict it will be politically irresponsible. Since the RNC has officially announced they will back Donald Trump as the republican candidate again, the Democratic ticket needs to be assigned to someone who stands a chance at beating Trump. Sanders is too much of an extremist to be able to do that.
In 2016, he lost the Democratic primary to Hillary Clinton, Sanders ran for the presidency and obtained a sizeable portion of the vote, but not nearly enough to win. In fact, NPR found that 12 percent of Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Trump in the election.
Many politicians utilize a tactic in which they lean more moderate in the general election. In the primaries, they are trying to get voted from only people in their party so it is less of a risk to be extreme and hard on certain issues.
In general however, you want to obtain as many votes as possible from every political category, so you need to make yourself palatable for as many people as possible. Sanders seems incapable of this and therefore is unlikely to win the presidency.
If I voted for him over a viable candidate to beat Trump, I’d consider my vote wasted.
My main goal in 2020 is to oust the Trump Administration. Sanders is not the guaranteed way to do that.
As it’s early in the race, only a slew of Democrats have already announced their candidacies and many more to be expected. To devote blind loyalty to Sanders now would be depriving myself to find a potentially even more ideal candidate. There are many other equally progressive candidates in the running already.
Sanders is an old white male and even though he has participated in many different civil rights events that do prove he is devoted to furthering the rights of the oppressed, he lacks the ability to relate to the struggles.
Ideally, I’d like to see the list of presidents diversify. Obama broke down barriers becoming the first Black president, why settle for that?
Women and people of color have contributed greatly to many successes in a variety of fields. It would be nice to see what they could contribute to politics at the executive level.
Sanders stands for amazing policies and seems genuine. I’d love to get a cup of coffee with him sometime. I’d also love to get a cup of coffee with my best friend, but do I want to see her be president? No, not really.
The Strategy of running left in the primary and to the right in the general is the thing that led us to lose over a thousand seats under Obama. It gave us Donald Trump.
If you look at the Republicans, you don’t see them moving to the center once they enter the general election. In fact, you see them harping away on illegal immigrants, high taxes, and other policies that their own base believes in. They give their base what they ran on, harnessing momentum from the primary to superserve and excite that base.
What got Donald Trump elected is no longer a single phenomenon but rather a strategy the Republicans have now adopted which allowed them to keep many of their seats in Congress. The Democrats need to take a similar strategy and excite their base, unlike the centrist strategy that has been proven to lose.
Perhaps one might argue that despite these losses, centrism is a winning approach because party loyalists are kept while you attract independents and moderates, of which a large portion of the Population identifies as. This would be incorrect. While the premises are mostly true, it fails to consider many factors. Of the independents who lean to the left, the majority support the same things the Democratic base does. Bernie Sanders, who pushed unapologetically for progressive policies was very popular among these independents, especially when compared to Hillary Clinton. Additionally, while many Americans Identify as moderate, they often support progressive policies when they are detached from the label. Medicare for All, as an example, has majority support among Republicans and Democrats according to one poll.
You also argued that we should let a minority or Woman become president. It’s odd that you do not acknowledge the fact that Bernie Sanders if Elected, would be the first Jewish President of the United States. Additionally, Bernie Sanders is leading in the polls 2:1 among African Americans. Why should Africans Americans have to vote for someone like Kamala Harris, who has a consistent record worse than the record of Bernie Sanders on things such as Marijuana Legalization, 3 strikes laws, and leniency on white collar crime?