Student POV: Why I’m Voting for Kamala Harris
She believes in solving gun violence and in my right to my body, has called for a ceasefire in Palestine, will unequivocally accept the results of the election for the good of the people
Photo via AP/Stephanie Scarbrough
Student POV: Why I’m Voting for Kamala Harris
She believes in solving gun violence and in my right to my body, has called for helping the middle class, will unequivocally accept the results of the election for the good of the people
My choice to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris this November wasn’t decided this summer. It was decided when I was 14, I stood in front of my parents’ TV and watched then-nominee for the Republican party Donald J. Trump laugh about how he regularly sexually assaulted women and got away with it because of who he was. That moment was what got me into politics, because I just couldn’t believe that half of voting America would back a man who was so boldly open about his criminal behavior.
America moved on from that leaked video, and Trump would go on to win the electoral vote in 2016. He would use his presidency to pack the Supreme Court with judges who overturned my right to my body; raise the national debt by 40 percent (more than in any other presidential term) because he wanted to lower taxes for the rich; deliberately spread misinformation about the COVID-19 crisis (a choice that would needlessly kill hundreds of thousands of Americans); and to top it off, he couldn’t handle losing in 2020 so he helped incite an insurrection against our nation that would leave 150 people injured and 2 dead.
Ironically, Trump uses the pro-police “Back the Blue” movement to shield his racism (he referred to COVID as “Chinese flu” and “kung flu,” he wanted to ban Muslim immigrants, and he was endorsed by the KKK in 2016, although his campaign rejected the endorsement, among other things). He was then convicted by a jury of his peers of 34 separate counts of committing fraud while he was president, making him a felon.
I could go on and on about why Trump is the single biggest threat to America and how that plays a role in how I am going to vote. But that would be an injustice against how great a candidate Vice President Kamala Harris is.
Harris comes from a middle-class biracial family, and she rose through the ranks of public office organically, without the benefit of a “small loan of a million dollars.” She went to Howard University and UC Hastings Law [now UC Law San Francisco], passed the notoriously difficult California state bar, became a prosecutor who not only put criminals away, but helped prevent repeat offending, and went on to become the first African-American, first Asian-American, and first woman to be elected San Francisco district attorney and attorney general of California. There she went after predatory for-profit colleges and banks, promoted criminal justice reform, and voiced opposition to the death penalty. As a US senator, Harris went viral for her grilling of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court over laws governing women’s bodies but not men’s, and she supported Medicare for all, COVID relief, and anti-lynching bills.
The Trump campaign has tried to go after Vice President Harris for a supposed lack of a policy platform; that claim is demonstrably false. She has released a detailed policy plan designed to help average Americans, which includes policies like down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, raising the level of eligible deduction expenses for small businesses, expanding healthcare access to rural Americans, passing the bipartisan border-security bill that Trump killed, among many other policies.
Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room; in our 248 years as a nation, we have never elected a woman. Many voters will need to overcome years of social conditioning that have told them that women aren’t meant to lead because of their sex.
For me, the facts are clear; Trump is an overall poor leader who has stated that he will not be a dictator “other than on day one.” He has told Christians that if he is elected “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.” He has tried to distance himself from the radical Project 2025, authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, which outlines a government where the Department of Education would be eliminated, where leaders would pursue mass deportations, where FEMA would be defunded, and where the terms “reproductive rights and “gender equality” would be deleted from all federal laws, among many other extreme policies. Yet his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, has written the forward for a forthcoming book written by Kevin D. Roberts, who oversaw Project 2025. Trump supporters commonly point to lower costs during his presidency as a reason to vote for him, but his economic proposals for tariffs and tax cuts have been repeatedly called out by economists as potentially causing massive costs for Americans and further inflation.
With all those facts in mind, Vice President Harris stands out to me as the only choice, and this time I don’t have to vote for Biden just to vote against Trump: I get to vote for a woman whose policies will benefit the middle class instead of the rich, who believes in my right to my body, who believes in common sense gun laws, and who unequivocally will accept the results of the election for the good of the people, something Trump has refused to say he will do.
Nina Gulbransen (CAS’25, GRS’25), executive board secretary of Boston University College Democrats, can be reached at ninamg@bu.edu.
“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact today@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.
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