Sunspots (https://sunspots.cornellsun.com/tag/politics/page/3/)
At last, the election is nearly upon us. The United States of America will have voted and within a fortnight we will know the outcome. Therefore, let me take this opportunity to explain why you should not be voting for Trump, one last time. First, let’s examine the reason why people vote, not only for Trump, but at all. What is the meaning of a vote?
I have an immense amount of respect for The Donald, and I could not be happier with how his campaign has unfolded. From his not-so-humble beginnings as just one hopeful drifting in a sea of infinitely more qualified candidates, Donald is the little, tiny-handed orange engine that could of American politics. Watching him rise to new levels of fame has truly been heartwarming, and has imparted some powerful lessons about what it truly means to be an American:
In America, you can be anything you want to be. No experience necessary! If you are white, wealthy and male, that is qualification enough.
Ladies and gents, step right up. You’ve all been waiting for this one. As a follow up to my last article, Super Smash Bros. in the Black Community (a link to that article is at the bottom which may be helpful to read first if you’ve never heard of Super Smash Bros.), I’ve decided to expand on Smash Bros. and mix it in with a dash of politics, a smidgen more of humor, and a concise list of politicians to lighten up the mood as we head closer and closer to yet another historic Presidential election.
We’re so quick to attack Trump and Clinton for being crooked, phony liars, but maybe it’s time we see ourselves as the true hypocrites. The 2016 presidential election has been touted as America’s most progressive election yet. Not only are the “real” issues coming to the forefront, but people are also visibly staking their personal claims in the outcome. From Facebook posts to baseball caps to hostile arguments at the dinner table, voters are making their personal allegiances known. Despite these allegiances, many of us are ambivalent about the candidates we’re rooting for.
Imagine a society in which almost 1 in 4 African-Americans are in poverty; for white people, the number is less than 1 in 10 (Proctor et al., 12). Imagine that society in which not only black children are more likely to be born into poverty, but half of them will also remain there as adults. Only a third of poor white people will stay in the lowest income quintile (Reeves, 1). No, this isn’t the 1850’s. This is American poverty in 2016.
Remember 2009 when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift at the VMAs and we all laughed and it either made you love Kanye or hate Kanye? It’s probably the most familiar example of a pervasive cultural phenomenon: manterrupting. If you’re a man, you’ve probably done it; if you’re a woman, you’ve probably experienced it. It’s an insidious social occurrence that emboldens men to speak over women and silences women from speaking up for fear of being perceived as too outspoken. It dictates all spheres of discourse, from the workplace to academia, from popular culture to the political arena.
With an open mind and two sides of the story, you’re bound to learn something new. Welcome to the zoo! This is a blog where both the Republican and Democratic viewpoints are represented. The blog is not meant to sway you either way necessarily, just to present both sides of the story. You may not agree with the whole article, but hey, you’re likely to agree with half!
The one-hour car ride back to Cornell from Auburn Prison is a time for tutors to talk about how the night went. On my last trip, a few of the tutors in my car observed a voting poster inside a classroom. They found its presence ironic: after all, felons can’t vote. According to New York state law, no one who is currently incarcerated or on parole can vote. With the election less than two months away, efforts to register voters are ever present on Cornell’s campus.
If you are like many college students, you probably find that you have barely enough time to complete your class work, let alone follow the news everyday. In case you have managed to avoid a newspaper since you came to campus in August, I am here with some potentially bad news: Hillary Clinton has lost the solid lead in the polls that she maintained towards the end of the summer. Nate Silver, the famed statistician of FiveThirtyEight, currently has Clinton’s chance of winning the election at only 55.8%, while a month ago he predicted her chance of winning at 80.9%. Furthermore, Donald Trump seems to be gaining more momentum in key battleground states like Florida and Ohio — both of which Silver predicted would vote for Clinton in August and now predicts will go to Trump. However, Clinton still has time to come back from her bumpy September.
Dear Undecided Voter,
Hey, I hope you’re doing well. I am not going to make this too long, because I get it, we’re all busy people. I just want to have a little chat. This is for all of you citizens out there who still haven’t made the ultimate choice: Trump or Clinton? You have your different reasons — some of you view yourselves as “independents” and would rather vote third party, some of you are just postponing what you perceive to be a choice between the “lesser of two evils” and some of you just feel so frustrated with our democracy and the way that this presidential election season has unfolded that you aren’t going to vote at all.