Courtesy: Melina Mara/Washington Post

I turned 18 in December of 2012. That meant I couldn’t vote in the 2012 election.

For someone who has been politics-crazed since I was a small child, that was somewhat of a disappointment. It also meant I was much older than the rest of my fellow first-time Presidential voters in 2016, at nearly 22 on November 8.

I’ve always known I’ve been a Democrat. Perhaps some of the blame goes to my late, union activist father. A loyal member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, he struck at the S.D. Warren Paper Mill in Westbrook, Maine, twice in the 1980s. He was ultimately laid-off in 1999. But union wages allowed a man without a college education to be able to buy a house, and then build his own in the 1990s. It allowed his wife — my mother — to stay at home with her young children. It allowed them to each own a car, and for a brief time, a motorcycle. In 2000, my father took me into the voting booth and let me fill in the circle labeled “Gore, Albert.” In 2004, during the Red Sox’s miracle World Series run, he pinned a “Kerry/Edwards” button to his Red Sox cap.

In 2005, he died of leukemia.

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2015. At this point, it seems abundantly clear that the major candidates in the Democratic primary are going to be Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. I had seen Hillary Clinton speak in person before; she came to a local high school in fall 2014 to stump for Maine’s ultimately doomed Democratic ticket of Mike Michaud (for Governor) and Shenna Bellows (for US Senate). But I liked a lot of what Bernie had to say — I attended his rally in Portland, and even attended a Sanders campaign-sanctioned watchparty for the first Democratic presidential debate. I came away largely unimpressed with all of the candidates. The next “debate” was a forum hosted by Rachel Maddow in November, 367 days before the 2016 presidential election. Again, I wasn’t quite impressed by Bernie, but I did like his message — Medicare for All, free college tuition, break up of the predatory banks.

But that night, Hillary Clinton got my support. Her answer on gun violence, particularly in regards to police murder of young African-American men, swayed me into her column —she cited conversations with the mothers of people murdered by police, and seemed to speak with genuine emotion, her eyes slightly watering. At that moment, I became perhaps the only millennial Hillary Clinton supporter in Portland, Maine.

I shouldn’t have been.

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My dad died in 2005 after a long bout with leukemia. I was 10.

For years, my mother — who worked as a lunch lady at the local elementary school — struggled to pay off his medical bills while also providing us a comfortable life.

I should’ve been supporting the candidate that endorsed a policy that would’ve alleviated that situation, that would’ve prevented it from ever happening to another family again. I found myself making excuses.

“Medicare for all will never pass,” I’d say when confronted by Bernie-supporting friends.

“Bernie’s not good enough on gun control.”

“Bernie’s supporters are kind of aggressive, no?”

“His foreign policy is lacking, and that’s the most important thing.”

“I don’t want to tell my children I didn’t support the first major female candidate for president.”

And when asked why I did support Clinton, including by a journalist interviewing Clinton supporters, I paused. Nothing immediately came to mind. I usually said something about gun control, foreign policy, or experience.

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In retrospect, I never should’ve supported Clinton. I was far to her left, far to the left of many of my friends who worked on her campaign, and had no real reasons to support her or her platform.

I made a mistake in 2016. I’m not making the same one again.

In 2020, I’m supporting the one candidate who’s supported Medicare for All for his entire political career. The one candidate who’s called out American war crimes while they happened. The one candidate who has been far and away the strongest advocate against wealth inequality in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive. The one candidate who has prioritized the mass incarceration epidemic.

I’m supporting Bernie Sanders for President of the United States.

Anthony Emerson is a writer and activist based in Portland, Me. He tweets @anthonyemerso14 and complaints can be emailed to him at anthonyemerson94-at-gmail-dot-com.