ELECTION 2016
Walking The Party Line BY SAM JONES
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ovember 8th, 2016. That’s the day Donald Trump was elected our nation’s next president. That was the date we marked our 239th year of peaceful transition of power here in the U.S. It was the day we came together as a people and made our voices heard, exercising our right and our duty to vote. It was also the day which preceded an absolute outpouring of anger, fear, and general upsetment. Articles began appearing, warning that a Trump win meant that America had finally accepted it was a nation of racial bigotry. Social media was abuzz with people claiming that this was the end of our nation, or even our planet. Protests broke out in the streets, all across the nation, and D.C. was absolutely swarmed with picket signs (carrying messages with varying levels of politeness). It isn’t hard to see that a large portion of the nation was, and still very much is, scared of the results of this election, and at the surface it seems quite obvious why: Our nation's next president rarely ever hit a 50% national approval rate at the best of times, and these certainly aren’t those. President Elect Trump didn’t even manage to win half the Republican Party’s support in the primaries. Donald Trump is not a well liked man, by any metric. Hillary Clinton, his opposition, didn’t fare much better in the arena of public opinion. A joint Washington Post/ ABC News poll taken of registered voters just a week before the election showed her to have an
uninspired 38/59 Favorable/Unfavorable split, compared to Trump’s equally impressive 37/60 split. So neither major candidate was well received. Then how did these two become this year’s candidates? How did one of them become president of the United States, despite abysmal levels of national support? How come neither of the third party candidates managed to gain traction? Well, the better part of the blame for this phenomenon can be placed squarely on the shoulders of the concept of the “Party Line,” and the way Americans walk it. While America wasn’t built with the intention of a two party system, George Washington himself making a special point to warn against them in his farewell address, the last time a candidate not from either the Republican or Democratic party was elected to the office of President was… 1848. The last time a candidate was elected who could truly be considered nonpartisan was in 1820, when James Monroe won the office nearly unopposed. That makes 196 years of heavily partisan politics. Political parties, particularly the two major parties we’ve grown to know and begrudgingly support, have been a part of American political framework for nearly as long as we’ve had one. And despite people’s rising ire with the established parties, as evidenced by anti-establishment candidates such as Bernie WINTER 2017
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