There are two opposing emotions at play for young American women watching the 2016 campaign unfold: cautious optimism and outright fear.
The vast majority of young women support Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump — a recent Harvard poll put Clinton 37 percentage points over Trump among women aged 18 to 29. So that cautious optimism is easy to explain: at the time of writing, the election forecasting website FiveThirtyEight puts Donald Trump’s chances of victory at 33 percent (though that's risen in the past four days alone).
But the fear is less easy to quantify, and concerns the question: where does America go from here? Because Clinton will likely win, many young women are looking past Election Day, and thinking about how this particularly nasty campaign will impact the U.S. in years to come.
Among the young women I spoke with, there was a general consensus that the hatred which has surfaced in recent months indicates that the country is deeply ideologically divided, and that reconciling those differences is a daunting challenge.
‘I do think that there are probably a lot of Trump supporters who have racist or sexist or xenophobic thoughts,’ Genevieve, a 23-year-old mental health lobbyist from Boston, told me.
‘Trump is not an aberration. He is the result of a politics of hate,’ says Yong Jung, 26,
who’s organized demonstrations outside Trump Tower in New York, and at Republican headquarters in Washington, D.C. ‘Trump knows that racism in America is a deep problem, and he’s using the fears of white voters to win votes.’
For Julia, 24, who lives in Kansas City, Trump is only a symptom of the problem. ‘Even if he doesn’t win, I still can’t believe the amount of people out there who are like “fuck black people, fuck Muslim people.” It really blows my mind that there’s still that level of ignorance in our country.’
‘I think it’s burst everyone’s bubble that we had shit under control here,’ she added.
The idea that things would ultimately work out in America does seem to have evaporated, because there’s a stark difference between the country that these young women — myself included — want to see, and the type that Trump supporters are pushing for.
‘The election has really made me scared to see what other people view as American,’ says Hayley, 21, a multiracial college student from Connecticut. ‘A lot of people view Americans as just white, abled-bodied, Christian men. That’s not the kind of America that I would hope to see.’
But the reason behind this problem of hateful and exclusionary attitudes is not as simple as pure racism, or even pure ignorance; it’s that the American system is failing many of its citizens. (For example, the median American income was lower in 2015 than it was in 1999; and satisfaction with the United States has decreased relatively steadily since the late 1990s.) And the crux of Trump’s campaign promise to ‘make America great again’ implies that the U.S. is currently well below the threshold that makes a country ‘great’.
‘There is a large section of this country that feels like they’re getting completely ignored,’ Genevieve said. ‘I think that people think that the system is broken, so the American dream isn’t possible anymore.’
‘This election has revealed the deep frustrations of Americans,’ Yong Jung says. ‘There’s a small group of people who are benefiting from the systems right now.’
So, to risk a cliché, something’s gotta give. A political system torn apart by unapologetic hatred from Trump supporters — and poorly masked disdain for those same voters by many in the Democratic party – is unsustainable, and antithetical to the American promise of liberty and justice for all. Americans want to feel that their voices are heard; that their votes matter.
‘I really hope this election, moving forward, wakes a lot of people up,’ Julia says. ‘I hope when we look back, we say, “that’s when we started making changes.” It’s made me see my country differently and want to change it. I can’t relax anymore now.’
That inadvertent call to action is something Yong Jung has recognized as well. ‘America was not a country that was fair and equal and just for all of us,’ she says. ‘It’s been movements and people and patriots who’ve been pushing our country to fulfil those ideals. I think our generation is going to be the people who make America great for the first time ever.’
There is nearly infinite room for improvement when it comes to the American democratic experiment, and rarely have we so obviously been faced with that truth. This election is asking us to choose what we stand for, and how we want to go down in history — because, no matter how ‘great’ we may consider ourselves, at 240-years-old, we are still a relatively young country, with much to improve upon, and high-minded foundational documents to live up to. But with a woman projected to win the presidential election, we are one step closer to levelling the playing field, and living up to the promise of a country that is just and equal for all.
Trump has, of course, dominated news headlines over the past year and a half, and this election has in many ways just become a referendum on him, and what he stands for — xenophobia, the patriarchy, capitalism run wild and sexism. But I was surprised by how much he dominated my conversations with young women; their collective worries about Trump seem to have overtaken any excitement about Clinton.
Genevieve has felt the similarly throughout the campaign season. ‘It is lost on people, the sort of magnitude of this election… that we’re probably about to elect the first woman as president.’
Lauren, a 26-year-old from Chicago, says, ‘hopefully if Hillary wins, there would be some pride… She is awesome and that’s gotten lost — how competent and qualified she is.’ But if Trump wins, she says she’d feel the need to apologize to foreigners for his victory.
As she puts it, right now ‘there’s definitely an identity crisis within the country.’
Even if projections prove true and Clinton wins, Trump voters will not fade quietly into the background. Can we heal the divisions that they've brought to the forefront of our national conversation?
Nora lives in New York, formerly a writer at The Atlantic she is currently Associate Editor at The Trace.
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Follow Nora on Twitter @biettetimons
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.