What Happened, Again.

The 2020 Election and how we got here.

I was sixteen when Donald Trump became the leader of our country.

I was sitting on the couch with my parents on a cold night in November after a long day excited and nervous to have the first woman elected to the highest office. We had chatted about it for months in AP Government, with ravaging discussions over lunch from passionate sophomores. The election had made its way into the crevices in our lives.

I did not even understand politics myself. I had just recently decided that my views were more liberal than my parents, but in a Democratic city in a deeply Republican state, my views were somewhere independent.

Yet, I was excited to see history being unwoven. This was just the beginning.

And then it happened.

Over the past four years, we have learned so much about our country and citizens than ever before. I now am a Political Science sophomore at college. We have studied the patterns, analyzed the people. We now know the perfect formula that resulted in this chemical explosion of Presidency.

And yet, we vowed to have fresh, new candidates for the next round. We wanted fresh, we wanted young. We wanted new faces, not old legacies. We wanted choices. We wanted to have respectable political differences than interpreted racism.

We had it. We had the most diverse Democratic Presidential candidates in history. We had the first Indian/Black woman, Senator Kamala Harris. We had the first LGBTQ+ candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. The first ethnically Jewish candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders. The first Hindu candidate, Representative Tulsi Gabbard. We even had one of my personal favorites, Asian-American Andrew Yang.

We had a range. We had choices. We saw new ideas and new people, ready to transform this country.

And then it happened again.

Nearly as quickly as it began, it ended. The women on stage were demonized and every one of their decisions put down. We attacked them, picked apart every part of their pasts broken up into shreds. We saw women, and our subconscious sexism came out (even I look back at some of my comments, as an ethnic woman, and cringe). We saw women, and then we didn’t. We saw diversity, and then we didn’t.

It all happened so quickly that it is hard to reflect, especially in a time like this. I have hope that this candidate will adopt the ideas of every one of the people who presented them first. I am glad to see there are already promises being made. I am optimistic that we will have the first female Vice President, and that will begin the change.

Yet, I still believe that it wasn’t supposed to end like this. I thought it was our time.

I hope it doesn’t happen again.