Lydia Mardin
Equinox Staff
The primaries have been in full swing since the Iowa Caucus on February 3, 2020, and surely there is a lot of anticipation to see who will be running against Trump for the presidency. Surrounding all this we have been able to see myriad candidates drop out; for example, Andrew Yang.
It is pretty fair to say that we will be seeing more leave before the primaries are over. Once candidates drop out, what will happen to the votes of the people who supported them? The newest movement to sweep the nation can offer a notion as to what will happen to these votes.
“Vote blue no matter who,” while not necessarily being the daring political chant it wants to be, does offer an interesting take when looking at the ways in which the Trump presidency has affected the Democratic Party.
So many Democrats are upset over his victory in 2016 and, subsequently, his presidency that the Democratic Party is trying to unify itself in this movement to remove sitting President Trump from office. This chant essentially states that in order to reclaim the presidency they must unify behind a single candidate.
Personally, this movement makes sense to me and really is not unique to any other of the multitude of political movements that are around right now. History proves that unification behind a party really is not a new idea.
While there are numerous examples, my mind immediately thinks of the election of 1864 when the Republicans in the North, during the time of the Civil War, unified to reelect Abraham Lincoln.
You can also extend this example to more modern-day experiences when the Republican Party unified under Ronald Reagan in 1980, and again in 1984, because we wanted to battle communism. Thus, with his outlook on the presidency and the way he looked at foreign affairs, the Cold War came to an end.
This eventually also happened in 1991 under the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who was coincidently Reagan’s vice president and also exemplifies party unification within the country, specifically in the Republican Party.
It is also not rare in the Democratic Party, for instance, keeping Lyndon B. Johnson in office in 1964 and in 1976 to keep Jimmy Carter in office against the incumbent Richard Nixion, who was elected into office in 1972.
I think that modern-day politics take a lot from past outcomes so the fact that this “Vote blue” movement is of any actual concern to anyone is insane.
Political parties are the way they are to give people who are not as involved in politics the chance to vote without needing to look into the background of every candidate. Essentially, it simplifies the way voting is approached, while it is important to look into certain candidates, mainly around the times of the primaries, for the presidential election it makes sense to just vote along party lines.
For example, most, if not all, Republicans will support Trump over a Democrat because of how his ideas and beliefs will most likely align with those who agree with the Republican Party over a Democrat’s views on certain issues. Party unification is prominent on both sides, whether it is explicitly stated or not, and there is no need to think this a groundbreaking revelation when it is not.
DISCLAIMER: This article is the sole opinion of Lydia Mardin
Lydia Mardin can be contacted at Lydia.Mardin@ksc.keene.edu
