Why America Deserves a Landslide on Election Night

Tonight, like many Americans, I will be watching the election results roll in with a great deal of anxiety. While I am hopeful that Hillary Clinton wins, I also care deeply about how she wins. That's because women — and Muslims, Mexican-Americans, Jews, disabled people, immigrants, and countless marginalized groups and people — deserve for Donald Trump to lose in a decisive landslide that makes them feel valued and safe in the United States of America.

The truth is, women haven't been able to fully revel in Clinton's history-making run. All politics aside, this is a watershed moment for gender equality in this country, and it matters greatly. But, it's been cheapened by the cartoon-ish misogyny she's had to face on the road to the White House. It's been diminished by the men we have seen wearing "Trump that b*tch" t-shirts on TV and smiling broadly. It's been deflated by the fact that, according to a recent New York Times poll, nearly half of teen girls said Donald Trump has impacted the way they feel about their bodies. The incessant sexism Clinton has faced, both subtle and overt, was felt deeply and by proxy by millions of women and girls. If anything, this election season has driven home the idea that a woman as president will in no way shatter the "final" glass ceiling any more than electing Barack Obama "ended" racism. It has reminded so many of us of our "otherness" every single day in ways both great and small, from the mildly annoying to the deeply painful.

Obama's run, and Clinton's, both offered a beacon of hope for our country; a promise that we could move past our racist and sexist histories, respectively. But they also served to bring long-simmering hatreds to the surface. In the course of this election, Trump has stoked that contempt and rage — making it seem somehow mundane and commonplace — to an extent we have not witnessed in a political campaign in our lifetimes. Trump's campaign has transcended politics to become a moral and ethical question America must answer.

I am not naive enough to think that the vitriol and hatred Trump has dredged up out of the muck will be silenced if he loses. But I am confident that if a broad majority of the country casts votes against him, we will not only wrest power away from his alt-right, sexist, racist cronies, but send a powerful message of solidarity within our borders and out into the world. We will prove that Trump's opinions are not American opinions. We will prove that we stood against hatred and division. We will come one step closer to healing the wounds this fraught election opened up.

That's why I'll be watching the polls tonight, not just waiting to hear that Clinton has won, but hoping that a remarkable majority of Americans cast their vote not only for themselves, but on behalf of each other.