Written by Paulina Ukrainets
The presidential elections are right around the corner, and if you have any form of social media, it shows. Every time I scroll through my Facebook feed, an overwhelming amount of second-cousins-twice-removed, middle-school-boyfriend’s Republican friends, and other people, with whom I now have only a very faint connection, post links to questionably-sourced articles about the presidential candidates. A lot of the time, the articles have little to do with the candidates’ actual policies, and a lot more to do with how they spent their weekend, what sort of coat they were wearing (if you don’t believe me, check Hillary Clinton’s TMZ page), and whose cat they were holding (Bernie, I’m looking at you).
Since I’ve spent the formative years of my adolescence in England, this is strange to me. Most of the time, I don’t know the names of any of the candidates for Prime Minister until they are actually elected. Honestly, I don’t think I need to—the party that the candidate represents is much more important. I don’t need to know the person to know their political values, and I most certainly don’t need to know the name of their daughter; all I need to know is their political party.
In the United States, though, the culture is almost reversed—the two-party system allows for lots of competition and discrepancies between the candidates, so much so that you can find candidates like Donald Trump and John Kasich, who, while opposing each other on a lot of issues, are still running for the same party.
Here, it is all about the candidate’s identity as a person; Hillary Clinton as a woman, Ben Carson as an African-American, Donald Trump as a businessman. It would be easy to blame the public for that, but I’ve been watching the campaigns capitalize on candidates’ personal traits. A few weeks ago, for example, at Clinton’s New Hampshire rally, Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem suggested that women should vote for Hillary in order to ensure the first-ever female presidency. Of course, a lot of women found these comments offensive and Steinem issued a retraction, but the issue they brought up still remains—do people vote for candidates because of their political stance, or because of their personal identity?
Politics are not personal. I’m a 19-year-old female from Russia and England, and I have a bit of trouble identifying closely with Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old male from Vermont. His policies, on the other hand, I have no problem identifying with, and, as recent primaries in New Hampshire show, neither do others. 55 percent of Democratic female voters voted for Sanders, as did 83percent of Democratic voters in the 18-29 age group.
With the enormous amount of media coverage all of the candidates are getting, it is sometimes hard to follow their politics, rather than their personalities and identities. Still, if you vote for someone who shares your opinion on taxes and renewable energy, rather than someone who shares your gender or home state, in a few years, I think you’ll find the changes you want to see in the United States much closer to being realized.