President Donald Trump appears at a rally on Feb. 28, 2020 in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
President Donald Trump slammed Democrats for the way they are reacting to the coronavirus threat, saying that their criticism of his administration’s handling of the outbreak is “their new hoax.” At a campaign rally in South Carolina a day before a critical Democratic primary, Trump patted himself on the back for the White House response to the coronavirus. “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” Trump said. “They have no clue, they don’t have any clue, they can’t even count their votes in Iowa.”
The president characterized the Democratic line of attack as only the latest in a string of efforts to hurt his administration. “One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax,” Trump said. “And this is their new hoax.” The criticism over the coronavirus response has now become the “single talking point” of Democrats, Trump said.
The president also used coronavirus as a reason to once again tout his immigration policies, and contrasted his view to that of Democrats. “We must understand that border security is also health security,” Trump said at another point in his rambling, nearly 90-minute speech. “We are doing everything in our power to keep the infection and those carrying the infection from entering the country. We have no choice,” Trump said. “Whether it’s the virus that we’re talking about, or the many other public health threats, the Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and wellbeing of all Americans.”
Trump also criticized the media, saying they were in “hysteria mode” over coronavirus, continuing with his administration’s trend of blaming news outlets for the growing concern over the virus and the drop in the stock market. Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney had said earlier Friday that journalists are trying to make the public panic over coronavirus to hurt Trump. The media are focusing on coronavirus because “they think this is going to be what brings down the president,” Mulvaney said.
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To get advice from Prudie, send questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.) Join the live chat every Monday at noon. Submit your questions and comments here before or during the live discussion. Or call the Dear Prudence podcast voicemail at 401-371-DEAR (3327) to hear your question answered on a future episode of the show.
Dear Prudence,
I dated “Steven” seriously about four years ago. We broke up when my career took me elsewhere. Steven has been dating another woman, “Tish,” for several months. Steven and I have been in vague contact over social media but only really see each other at mutual friends’ events. The one time I met Tish, she was aggressively friendly to me and then apparently set about trashing me; many friends have told me she speaks of me with venom. I’ve recently moved back to my old city, and my plan was to just avoid them both. But I have been told (again by mutual friends) that Tish and Steven will not attend functions if I am there. We’re all adults in our 30s! I don’t want to have to find all new friends. I don’t have much in common with my colleagues and haven’t had any luck meeting people through volunteer work.
Steven recently sent me a private message explaining that Tish finds me “intimidating” and bad for her anxiety. He suggested that I give our friends some breathing room since I am making them choose here and Tish just needs some time. My first thought was to say that was the most pathetic and egotistical thing I have ever heard. My next thought was to ask Steven where his balls were—Tish’s purse? I have not responded at all yet. Our social group only really gets together a few times a month. There is not a lot of overlap. I have no clue how to move forward here, if I should tell people the truth or just play it by ear?
—Avoidant Ex
I’m so relieved you wrote to me before saying “Where are your balls—Tish’s purse?” to your ex. Perhaps my fondest wish for this column is to help prevent the necessity of having to apologize to someone who’s behaved rudely, as there are few things more demoralizing than realizing you’re going to have to choke back your pride and say you’re sorry to someone who’s been trying to get a rise out of you for ages.
Steven and Tish’s request that you hold yourself personally responsible for her insecurity is unreasonable, and you were right to ignore it. Continue to ignore all unreasonable requests, if any more should arise, and attend whichever get-togethers you like. You are not making anybody choose a side. If Steven and Tish decide not to go to the movies with friends simply because you’ll be there and you dated Steven four years ago, they are free to do so. If your mutual friends continue to give you secondhand messages about what Steven and Tish think of you, tell them (politely!) you’re not interested in playing a game of telephone. It is juvenile, and there’s nothing you have to do here except see your friends and enjoy the fact that you’re not in a relationship like Steven and Tish’s.
Help! I Found Out My Boyfriend Did Blackface in College.
Danny M. Lavery is joined by Faran Krentcil on this week’s episode of the Dear Prudence podcast.
Dear Prudence,
I have a friend who is a heavy social media user. She sends me Snapchats of mundane things throughout the day and tags me constantly in Facebook and Instagram posts that are totally unrelated to my interests. If I weren’t constantly getting notifications from her, I’d check these apps once a day or less. It’s gotten worse because she is depressed, lonely, and working a boring job that she hates. It’s been hard to get her to see me in person or talk to me, so I make an effort to respond to them because it’s the only way she’s connecting with me right now. But it’s getting really annoying that my phone is always blowing up. I really want to turn off my social media notifications and cut back how often I’m checking these apps, but I’m afraid that will be hurtful or cause her to withdraw from me even more. How can I talk to her about the fact that she’s sending me BuzzFeed quizzes all day but won’t engage in normal conversation with me? She straight-up ignores my messages if they aren’t a response to “Pick your favorite vegetable and we’ll tell you which Disney prince is your soulmate.”
—At a Loss
You don’t need to ask your friend’s permission in order to turn off social media notifications—do it right now. Even if your friend hates her job and is going through a hard time, you have every right to develop whatever relationship to social media you think best, and it’s not unsympathetic or unsupportive to decide you don’t want to check Facebook 12 times a day. That sounds exhausting and unpleasant! But part of what’s tricky about depression is that it can make maintaining friendships and conversations beyond “take a look at this quiz” extremely difficult. That doesn’t mean that the quizzes are the only thing standing between your friend and total isolation. You can still offer her your support while also cutting back significantly on your social media time.
After you’ve adjusted your settings to your own liking, tell your friend that you’ll be less online from now on, but that you’d love to keep in touch in person or over the phone. You can be upfront about your choice while also acknowledging her struggles: “I wanted to let you know I’m trying to scale back on social media, so if you notice I don’t respond as often to Snapchat, that’s why. I think it’ll be really good for me. But I also know that’s the way we’ve often kept in touch, and I don’t want to fall out of contact with you.” You may even want to ask if she’s noticed that she’s stopped responding to your texts too (it’s possible to acknowledge that shift without judgment or recrimination), and whether there’s anything you can do to help or anything she needs to talk about. It may also mean, every once in a while, leaving her a message or sending her a text that ends with, “You don’t need to call me back if you don’t feel up to it; just know that I’m thinking of you and hope you’re taking care of yourself today.”
Dear Prudence,
My stepmother spent my childhood cutting me down to build her daughter up. Any accomplishment of mine was nothing, and anything my stepsister did was celebrated. I would get straight A’s, and I got lectured. My stepsister managed not to completely fail her honor classes, and she got a party. I dropped out of college to pursue a career in a technical field; my stepsister failed out completely. She currently works in retail but plans on pursuing a master’s degree.
I got a promotion at work and threw a small gathering to celebrate. My stepmother started to belittle me, saying any “idiot” could work at my company and that it was all busywork. I told her that at least I wasn’t stupid enough to have over $75,000 in college loans and working for minimum wage. I left school with a 3.8 GPA, and my company was offering to pay for me to finish it. I told her to leave—I wasn’t going to listen to her while she ate my cake. My father told me I couldn’t speak to his wife like that. I told him to leave too. My stepsister was in the next room. I wasn’t thinking about her; I just wanted to stand up to my stepmother. My stepsister announced to the room that what I had said was 100 percent true, and she congratulated me. Then she left. I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family. My parents can go rot for all I care, but I know I owe my stepsister an apology. We aren’t close, but she did not deserve that. Every time I try to get the right words out, they get tangled up in resentment and regret.
—Constant Comparison
It might help to put what you want to say in writing if you don’t yet feel prepared to have a conversation with your stepsister about the painful forced-competition dynamics you experienced growing up. I’m of the opinion that an apology should usually be able to stand on its own without a lot in the way of explanation, if only because that can pretty quickly start to look like a series of excuses or mitigation. Your goal shouldn’t be to try to heal your relationship or perfectly address everything your parents did wrong in the past. It should simply be to apologize for what you said at your party. And nothing could really be simpler: “I’m so sorry for how I treated you at my party. I don’t think you’re stupid, and I should never have said that. I was angry and wanted to lash out. That’s no excuse for how I spoke about your work and your life. I know you work hard and that you’re excited to get your master’s degree, and I’m sorry I spoke so rudely about your life. I want to find ways to defend my own life without trying to tear other people down, so that even if I find myself getting angry or defensive in the future, I don’t say things like this again.”
Unless your stepsister congratulated you in the most sarcastic of tones, she seems to be on some level aware that your parents have a history of forcing comparisons between the two of you and also objected to the way they spoke to you at your party. You two may not necessarily become the closest of siblings after this, but it’s possible she’ll be receptive to your apology and want to talk more about your shared history, which may help put to rest some of the old resentments your parents have tried to engender. Good luck!
My 3-year-old was just invited to his first school friend birthday party. This will be the first party where I don’t know the parent. He has a severe peanut allergy, and I have a lot of anxiety about it. Which is the best way to handle this?
1) Go to the party but leave before cake time, inevitably resulting in a tantrum and probably both of us crying on the way home.
2) Go to the party and bring our own snack box with a cupcake. I’m nervous this will make me look like “that mom” and appear really high maintenance. I would text the mom beforehand and let her know that I’d be bringing our own.
3) Stay home. This is my preferred option but I know I can’t keep him in a bubble forever.
I like the birthday boy. He and my son hug when they see each other at school in the mornings. I know he would have fun, and I don’t want him to miss out on normal kid experiences because of his allergy and my anxiety. I’m probably overthinking this.
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Sure, sure, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says you should wash your hands for 20 seconds, using lots of soap and friction. But when that recommendation meets poorly-stocked public restrooms, or distracted humans in a hurry, what happens to handwashing effectiveness? Are some seconds better than none; is a soapless wash better than giving up; does hand lotion make germs sticky? And what if there’s no way to dry off?
Amid the current coronavirus outbreak, we here at Slate find ourselves flooded with questions about a humble practice we’ve always taken for granted. I spoke with Dr. Robert Amler, Dean of the School of Health Sciences and Practice at New York Medical College and former CDC Chief Medical Officer, to get some advice. With the stipulation that some of our weird queries don’t have strictly science-based answers, but could be answered from his own store of practical common sense, Dr. Amler agreed to play along.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
OK, so we know you’re supposed to wash your hands for 20 seconds. If you only wash your hands for 10 seconds, do you get half of the benefit, or is it all or nothing?
Well, 20 seconds is the recommendation, as you know. I don’t know if that’s been studied or if there’s any real data on what happens with a shorter time. The fact is, your hands have a certain amount of surface area, and you need to spend a second or more in each area. You want to cover the front the palms of your hands. You want to cover the backs. You want to cover the spaces between the fingers and your thumb—those webs—and if you really scrub all that, it’s just probably going to add up to about 20 seconds.
We’ve noticed that in a lot of public bathrooms, there’s no soap or hot water. Is it still worthwhile to wash your hands under those conditions—or, maybe, should you wash longer to make up for it, if you don’t have soap or hot water?
Oh, well, the heat of the water is more a comfort factor than anything antibacterial. The heat does not protect against bacteria any better than cold water does. But of course it’s far more comfortable to use warm water than cold!
The soap does have antimicrobial properties; the chemical material of it is very destructive to these microscopic organisms.
So let’s put it this way: 20 seconds is better than 10 seconds, but 10 seconds is still better than zero. Soap is better than no soap, but washing with water Is still better than nothing; you can try to make up for it by scrubbing your hands a lot more vigorously than you would otherwise.
If you really don’t have access to soap and water, the recommendation is hand sanitizer. And, if you can’t do a good job of cleaning your hands, be even more careful not to touch your face, until you can get those hands clean!
Have you ever carried soap in your bag, in case you come to a place where there’s no soap?
I’ve done that a few times, because when I travel sometimes you end up in a place where soap is not easy to find. When I travel, like most people, I carry hand sanitizer. Just today, going to several meetings where I shook hands and touched several other people, I had hand sanitizer with me the whole time and I was using it the better part of the morning.
Okay, here’s another supply issue. Sometimes there are no paper towels, or just an air dryer, or neither! Is it better to wash your hands and not dry them, or not wash your hands at all?
You really need to wash your hands! Don’t take the absence of towels as a reason not to do it. The whole issue really is not bringing infective material onto your face, with your hands transferring the material to your face. So the name of the game is to keep your hands clean and not to touch your face. If there’s really nothing to dry them with, you could kind of flap them in the air for a little while.
One of my colleagues heard that should wash your hands before you use the bathroom, and also after. That’s too much, right?
Well, it all depends. Where have your hands been? If you just came out of a crowd of people, and you were touching and shaking hands and grabbing and touching things, you might feel like you want to do the toileting functions with freshly clean hands, and then when you’re finished, because of contact with private parts and parts of the toilet, you will almost certainly need to wash your hands again. So washing before and after is not wrong!
In a related question, is it possible to overwash? Some people worry if they wash their hands too much, their hands will be cracked or dry, and that will make it easier for them to get infected by something.
Yes, some doctors and nurses and other healthcare people—they wash their hands constantly all day long, and use hand sanitizer all day long, and it is true that over time your skin takes a beating, and for some people they may have skin irritation. Your best defense against that is to use a soap that has a little lotion built into it, and maybe use a hand lotion on your hands at the end of the day, so that overnight the skin gets a chance to heal.
Does the application of hand lotion, just randomly during the day, have any effect on the transmission of bacteria?
I’m not aware—I wouldn’t expect any protection from it, but I’m not aware that it interferes with cleanliness.
We often hear, “Just sing Happy Birthday, or sing Happy Birthday twice,” and one of my colleagues said “Ugh! I just want to count to 20!” Is that okay?
What I recommend to my own patients is to time yourself. Some people sing it so quickly, and some so slowly. Time yourself! If there’s a song you like better, or counting, time that, too. There’s nothing magical about the particular song you sing [laughs].
Here’s an etiquette question. We know most people don’t wash their hands well. If you are in a public restroom, is there anything you can do to try to encourage the people around you to wash their hands, or do you just leave them alone?
Well, unfortunately, that’s really a sociology question. I’m not well equipped to tell you, but I think a little politeness goes a long way.
I think the main thing is, you want to protect yourself—at the risk of sounding repetitive, wash those hands, keep those hands clean, and keep them off your face, as much as you can.
It’s exhausting!
Yes, I know! But that’s it.
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Former presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, seen on Tuesday. Clinton suggested in 2017 that forecasting had something to do with her loss to Donald Trump.
David Gannon/Getty Images
The months after the 2016 presidential election were a brutal time for election forecasters. Many Democratic voters felt misled, even betrayed, by the comforting voices in the media that had reassured them earlier that fall that a philandering and crass television star had essentially no shot at beating an experienced politician. In the aftermath of Election Day, there were reckonings. Many began to question the value of such horse-race coverage to begin with. The New York Times, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, and the Princeton Election Consortium all put Clinton’s chances somewhere between 70 to 99 percent—damaging public trust in several institutions.
But it’s possible that these predictions did something else harmful.
Three researchers dove into the numbers to see if it was possible that such forecasting had ultimately inflated potential Democratic voters’ confidence to the point it depressed voter turnout.
The research led to some fascinating and very clear results. The experiments concluded that these forecasts had infused the entire public discussion around the 2016 election, making it difficult to miss—and that those who hear about a candidate’s high probability of winning do indeed stay home. And so, the authors conclude, because Hillary Clinton was the one polling well ahead and because largely liberal audiences consume the articles these forecasters produced, the audience that the forecasts reached most widely consisted of the same people who were more likely to be deterred by the numbers in the first place.
“We cannot say with certainty,” Sean Westwood, one of the authors, said in an email. “But given how close the election was in some states, it is entirely possible that forecasts could have flipped the election in favor of Trump.”
The alleged effect is related to how FiveThirtyEight and a small number of other sites present their analysis—and how the public understands probability versus a more conventional presentation of each candidate’s expected vote share with a margin of error. The former is easier to understand on its face, but that’s the problem. A 90 percent chance of a candidate winning makes it seem like they have an overwhelming lead on the opponent and should finish with a significantly higher number of delegates. But a probability of a win doesn’t actually mean a probability of a significant victory. It doesn’t mean the election will be a blowout when the votes are counted.
Study subjects who were given a sample prediction from FiveThirtyEight tended to hold off on voting if their candidate had a high-percentage probability towin.
“Humans just cannot process probabilities accurately,” Westwood said. “Even though they make for dramatic headlines, the research shows it is nearly impossible to convey probabilities in a way that does not generate confusion.”
Hillary Clinton herself had suggested that forecasting had something to do with her loss. “I don’t know how we’ll ever calculate how many people thought that it was in the bag, because the percentages kept being thrown at people—‘Oh, she has an 88 percent chance to win,’ ” she said in a 2017 interview with New York magazine.
Clinton was correct to say it’s very difficult to know how much overconfidence played a role, but the authors set out to find out if two separate outcomes were likely: First, did the forecasters’ work actually make a significant number of people feel overconfident in Clinton’s victory? And second, did that overconfidence actually make a real-world difference in the election’s result?
Previous studies have already found that people are far less likely to vote if a race is not tight. Alternative explanations include that campaigns just stop working as hard to get out the vote, but at least some others say that election predictions may cause voters to stay home. According to Messing, if a network makes an early call for a race as Election Day plays out, voter turnout on the West Coast drops.
Messing and his colleagues ran several experiments comparing voter behavior after they received predictions of vote shares with behavior after voters received probability forecasts. In one experiment, they put real money on the line (“because in a survey everyone says they’ll vote,” Messing said) and told participants they would win money if their candidate won. But crucially, participants also had to pay some of that money in order to vote at all. Those who were given a sample prediction from FiveThirtyEight tended to hold off on “voting” if their candidate had a high-percentage probability to win. Those who received vote-share numbers tended to vote no matter what.
Messing cautioned that this was a laboratory experiment and wasn’t meant to account for all factors, but he said the results were still compelling. “If you extrapolate this experiment to the real world,” Messing said, “you might expect to see a 6 percent decrease in voting, based on where the New York Times had Clinton.”
And, he said, because voters identify so emotionally with their party these days, they might be even more likely to have an inflated sense of their candidate’s chances at success—meaning that the prediction from the experiment could even understate the impact of probability forecasts.
They also found that FiveThirtyEight in particular really did appear to have a strong influence on voters’ behavior. During the 2018 midterm elections, there was a brief error that emerged in FiveThirtyEight’s algorithm that caused a spike in their forecasts, suggesting the Republicans had a good chance to win the House. When that happened, the U.S. bond market also spiked. “We’re not talking about a bunch of political wonks,” Messing said.
To be clear, the authors do not intend their analysis as an attack on Silver, who was arguably the most cautious forecaster during the 2016 election. (FiveThirtyEight also did present vote-share data; it just was hidden behind a separate tab on the site.) At the time, Silver made it clear that his work was complex and that it did not by any means say that Clinton was a shoo-in for the presidency. But Silver’s work was amplified by other news outlets, and during that amplification, some of that nuance was lost.
“Forecasters such as FiveThirtyEight offer a great deal of context on their predictions, but the problem is that this is lost when the prediction is covered by another media outlet,” Westwood said. “It just becomes ‘Nate Silver says Hillary Clinton will win by 80 percent.’ ”
The worst perpetrator of this, according to the paper, was MSNBC, which referenced FiveThirtyEight and other forecasts 16 times a day during one part of the campaign. “It’s broadcast across society, and cable news is the way that happens,” Messing said. “I think there’s a number of folks who may not be couching these results with the appropriate caveats when they’re talking about them. Because, you know, broadcast journalism in particular is not made for carefully caveating things.”
Even then, Messing said that those who were more likely to understand how the number-crunching works were likely to get confused when “the whole ecosystem” becomes inundated with these forecasts. “I have a master’s in statistics,” he said. “And based on the probabilistic forecasts out there in 2016—and I’m not talking about FiveThirtyEight, but all of them—I was sure that Clinton was going to win.”
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On a recent episode of How To!, political strategists David Axelrod and Mike Murphy help an undecided voter, Anthony, pick a presidential candidate for 2020. Axelrod is best known for being the mastermind of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, and Mike Murphy is a veteran GOP consultant and prominent Never Trumper; together they host a podcast called Hacks on Tap. They spoke with host Charles Duhigg about character, experience, and the “moral tariff” paid for voting in your self-interest. This transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.
David Axelrod: One thing that the past decade should have taught us is a little bit of humility in making summary political judgments. One of them is that Bernie Sanders would be an abject disaster and couldn’t win. I think that’s an open question, honestly. The one thing that I think people in politics do too little is listen. Mike joked about turning the podcast into a focus group, but people can be counterintuitive. So it’s important to approach this with an open mind and try and understand how people are making their judgments.
Charles Duhigg: Both of you said it’s a false dichotomy to say “follow your brain” versus “follow your heart.” And in some ways you should just listen to what matters to you and follow that path. But what advice do you have for people who are trying to figure out how to prioritize these things?
Mike Murphy: Well, it’s hard because with each candidate, particularly for president, you get a salad of things, which is certain issues they’re very focused on, other issues they sort of have to be allegiant to based on the reality of the party. People are more complex than simple liberal, conservative. I always say, just imagine you’re a congressman. What would be the most important single vote or piece of legislation you’d try to support if you had two years there?
The other thing, what a lot of people do, is they just decide who sees the world the way they would, because you’re really voting for a proxy to make the decisions you’re not going to make, because you’re not there. So what is their life experience, their character, their passion, their family, their experience? You just kind of sum it all up and say, “All right, that’s somebody I’m comfortable with, representing me, making those decisions behind the big desk.”
David: It isn’t just an equation about issues. It’s also worldview and culture, whether you feel comfortable with a person you’re voting for, and the character of that person to do the right thing.
Charles: So let me challenge this a little bit. I am not a fan of Donald Trump. I’m registered as a Democrat, and yet under Donald Trump, my life has actually been pretty good. The news media is doing pretty well. Stock market’s gone up. I haven’t been at the border. And I look at Bernie Sanders and think to myself, although he’s not someone I would choose as my candidate, but if he was in the general, he’s someone who agrees a lot more with my values than Donald Trump does. But he actually presents a real risk, I think, to my life. He’s going to tax me and the people in New York a lot. He could take away my health care. How should I parse through choosing a president based on character versus choosing a president based on my own self-interest?
Mike: The great challenge of the Trump era, especially for center and center-right people who care about the economy and, as you say, their personal lives and how they’re doing economically, is what is the moral tariff you are willing to pay for that? You know, if you’re a computer and you’re designed to pick your voting challenge purely on economic growth, then the machine, without feeling or moral compass, just beeps and says Trump has done well.
But if you think about it, character in office, who makes the right decision, and other intangibles like competence and the risk of incompetence, which could be catastrophic down the line in a foreign policy crisis—you just have to decide how big of a price are you willing to pay for some economic results. And that’s a moral question that people have to look within and decide.
Charles: There’s probably a number of Republicans out there who say, “Look, I did vote for Trump, and I didn’t vote for Trump just because I’m rich and I want him to cut my taxes. I voted for him because even though I think he’s personally distasteful, I actually think the moral thing to do is to vote for this guy because he puts the judges that I want on the bench, he upholds the values—even if he doesn’t live by those values, he at least talks about those values.”
“When the country is mad at the system, it elects Republicans like Trump and Democrats likeSanders.”— Mike Murphy
Mike: I hear it all the time. It’s basically a low tax of personal disgust I paid for policy victories. No, the vast majority of Republican voters are right now paying that tax without too much complaint.
Charles: How do you guys think someone should analyze experience? How important is having been a governor, versus being a senator, versus being a businessman who comes out of nowhere, versus being a mayor?
David: Yeah, it used to be a lot more important. I am hopelessly biased on this question, and yet one of the virtues of campaigns is that you do get to see how people handle all kinds of different pressure and all kinds of complex issues, and paying attention to campaigns is really an important part of this. Obama proved himself from the beginning of that campaign, he proved himself through the campaign, 50 primaries against an array of opponents, dealing with all kinds of challenges. And by the end of it, these things were signals to voters that, yeah, I think he’s up to this. And so campaigns matter in judging how people might function as a president.
Mike: I would not be looking for risk. I would not be looking for revolution. I would not be looking to nominate a candidate that Trump can make the election about, because that increases risk and that deters from the overall mission of letting the country do what I think it wants to do, which is fire Donald Trump. So I might be a little timid, which means I would be looking at candidates who are unlikely to be easily turned into scary monsters. In other words, I wouldn’t be for Bernie Sanders. Though I agree with David. When the country is mad at the system, it elects Republicans like Trump and Democrats like Sanders. So I’d be trying to back down from that kind of horrible standoff and go with a little tamer, more centrist Democrat, be it an Amy, a Peter, a Bloomberg.
Charles: So let’s say we make it through the primary, and we got Donald Trump versus Bernie Sanders. Is it moral for me to just stay home?
David: Well, it’s certainly an option in our democracy to do that. We saw people do that in 2016. The reason Donald Trump is president is because of low turnout in some key areas. The reality is one of them is going to be president of the United States. And if you believe that the president of the United States is significant in terms of the impact on the life of the country, the life of the world, and your own, then it would behoove you to make a decision, one way or the other.
Anthony: What’s your opinion on independents? Voting for someone who’s not in one of the two parties?
David: I think that you want to vote for one of the candidates who is actually in contention for the presidency. Given the gravity of the times, I think a symbolic vote is a wasted vote. Anthony, you gotta suck it up, evaluate these candidates, and cast a vote for one or the other in hopes that that person will become president.
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