Props To America: 2016 Is Our Most Diverse Election Yet

Anti-establishment politics are undoubtedly a huge aspect of the 2016 Election, with Real Clear Politics finding that about 64% of Americans feel that the country is on the wrong track, but one area in which our political system is definitely running in the right direction is representational diversity.

The 2008 Election was obviously a watershed moment in political diversity with America electing its first African-American president, Barack Obama, but Hillary Clinton was the runner-up and the initial frontrunner. Both a black man and a woman dominated the Democratic Party’s primary, and since then the hegemony of white, male American leadership in national politics has been relegated to history.

The 2012 Election was even more diverse with Democrats continuing their support of President Obama, and on the Republican side Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann both flirted with frontrunner status.

This is awesome for our democracy, and though Congress still lags far behind in representational accuracy (Congress is improving, too!), the 2016 Election has been the most demographically sensitive yet.

Hillary Clinton again is the Democratic Party’s frontrunner, and the Republican Party has shown strong support for Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, as well as Cuban-Americans Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. In fact, conservative media outlets have started predicting that the Republican primary will end up as a battle between Rubio and Cruz for the nomination, and this idea is quickly gaining traction within the larger political narrative.

If the general election came down to Hillary Clinton versus either Rubio or Cruz, it would be another historical moment of political diversity, one in which neither of our major political parties nominated a white male. Down with racial and gender precedence!

Now this is obviously a significantly hypothetical situation as of today, with the primaries far from beginning, let alone culminating in a nominee selection, but the point is that few people would likely have thought that this would be a reasonable hypothetical three elections ago with 2004’s routine white male matchup between George W. Bush and John Kerry.

So yeah, maybe America’s economy and foreign policy are meandering off the public approval tracks, but at least Americans are quickly trust-busting the white male monopoly of our presidential primaries.

Image via Omnifeed