Blog Post 5-(Elections)

Voting is a linkage institution because it’s the most common form of political participation. Adding on, you become connected to the government by voting. When elections are occurring it can influence an individual’s political belief by influencing them to have the same ideas which will end up supporting the person who is running for a position. The election I have decided to write about is the 2016 U.S Presidential Election. It came down to two candidates which were Donald Trump who is the Republican nominee, and Hillary Clinton who is the Dem

Donald Trump is the first candidate that I chose, and he is associated with the Republican party. Some of the issues that he cared about are immigration, sexual harassment, gun control, and the military. While Donald Trump was running for president he had many sexual offenses on women which ended up offending many women in the United States. The following artifact comes from the website Vox (Source) and it talks about the women that helped Donald Trump win. This is in favor of Donald Trump because although he has offended many women around the country were offended he still managed to get a decent percentage of women votes. It shows that they were the reason he won the election. Trump managed to get more white women (without college degrees) to vote for him which means his offenses didn’t impact them. I believe they still support him because they are from the same political party which is republican.

The following artifact comes from the website BBC (Source) and it’s about a video that was resurfaced about Donald Trump making unacceptable comments about women. It’s arguing that he should drop out of the election after this tape came out. It shows also that he has no respect for women even though he says he does. According to the website, “at least 10 Republican senators have either said they will not be voting for the Republican candidate in the general election in 30 days' time, or have called for him to stand aside.” Trump still continued to run for president even though this video was released and he says he only continues in order to not let down his supporters.

The second candidate I have chosen is Hillary Clinton and she is associated with the Democratic Party. The main issues that Hillary Clinton cares about are women’s rights, health care, and economic issues. Hillary Clinton has helped raise awareness and help women know their rights. Also, when it comes to economic problems she believes that people who are rich don’t pay their share.

The following artifact is from a website called National Public Radio (Source) where it shows why women support Hillary Clinton which makes it pro-candidate. The main argument of this article is about Clinton understanding the issues that women have nowadays.

This chart shows that more women support her than other people that were running. For example, Bernie Sanders another candidate who was also running didn’t have as much women supports. This article states, “But almost everyone at some point in the conversation, whether or not they were committed to voting for Clinton, mentioned they like her, because she understands "women's issues." This term — "women's issues" is vague and has a different definition depending on who's using it.” What they mean by understanding women issues is equality when it comes to jobs and the things they need to raise a family. This artifact relates to Ms. Hillary’s political stances on women’s because she wants to improve women's lives and have more gender equality.

The next artifact I have chosen is about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and it is anti-candidate which was covered by BBC News (Source). This website specifically talks about her having only one email on one device. She only had personal emails which are not a government email. According to BBC News, it states, “According to Mrs. Clinton, the primary reason she set up her own email was for "convenience". During a press conference at the UN, she said that she preferred to carry only one smartphone with one email address, rather than have two devices - one for work and one for personal affairs.” Even though she says that it was for convenience many people found it out of the ordinary on why she didn’t have a government email. This whole scandal made her look bad when running as a candidate. This artifact relates to Hillary Clinton’s stances because she lost trust between her suporters which impacted her negatively. Due to this, the government has also been suspicious.