It’s been eight years since I hopped out of bed on the morning of Nov. 9, 2016 and ran to find my parents. They’d forced me to go to sleep before the last polls closed the night before, and I was anxious for results. Like many Americans, I thought I knew exactly how the election would turn out; I adamantly believed America had elected a woman to be my president – that my country had represented me before I was tall enough to reach a ballot box. 

But my parents’ faces were ashen and tired when I found them in the kitchen, and I spent that morning in tears. Eventually, I forgave America – consoling myself with the fact that Donald Trump hadn’t won the popular vote. At 9 years old, my anti-electoral college sentiments were mounting, but I hadn’t lost faith in my country. And after those four gray years, I believed we would never let it happen again.

It’s been three days since election day 2024, and I feel unforgiving.

My country made me stand in my kitchen, in the dark, and break down once again. And this time, I didn’t even have the small prize of a popular vote loss for Trump. I shed tears of fear, not just loss: fear for democracy and human rights and freedom. I feel drowned out and lost and angry. This election was a failure of more than 70 million American voters to learn from their mistakes and a huge blow to the posterity of this nation.

I don’t feel bad for condemning Trump voters or for taking personal offense. Throughout my life, I’ve heard over and over that politics are impersonal, that I shouldn’t let them come between relationships or familial bonds. But this election feels different, and I’m running out of excuses to make for those who voted for a man who openly said he’d ensure that Americans would never have to vote again.

It doesn’t matter if he can actually do it – and I know he probably won’t. It’s the fact that he’s deranged enough to say it that should’ve told voters all they needed to know. His closest advisors are deranged enough to propose ending the Department of Education and taking the fluoride out of our water. His supporters were deranged enough to organize an insurrection on our nation’s Capitol. 

Frankly, I just don’t get it. It’s maddening. Did voters pick a president based on vibes rather than doing a quick Google search? Was it the Indian, Black and woman factors? Worst of all, did they know exactly what they were voting for? That’s what I take the most personally of all.

The election was personal because I’m a woman now being subjected to the political reign of a rapist, because my uterus is my own, because I love this country too much to watch it fall to Christian nationalism, because I will graduate college into a job market dependent on the economic decisions of the next presidency, because I want to be able to marry whomever I love, and because the people of color in my life deserve to escape institutional racism.

I could go on.

It’s personal because my mom sends me to school every day praying I’ll come home without a bullet wound, because I know OB-GYNs in the South who have to wait until pregnant patients are dying in front of them to perform legal abortions, because I have trans and nonbinary friends whose life saving healthcare is at stake, because I believe in a free, nonpartisan press, because I know education is a human right, not a privilege, and because I spent the early years of my life in a state built on the backs of Mexican immigrants.

So don’t tell me it’s not personal, and don’t tell me there’s any reconciliation to be had across party lines. This isn’t your grandmother’s political divide; it’s fascism vs. everyone else, and fascism just won in a landslide. If I’m extreme for saying that it’s a privileged decision to be able to choose tax cuts over the livelihoods of marginalized Americans, so be it.

That said, while the failures of the American people are resounding and nearly unbearable to reckon with, I know that higher powers are also to blame for misleading the public.

The destructive both side-ism that many media organizations wallowed in throughout this election cycle – I’m looking at you, New York Times – allowed many voters to believe the falsehood that all elections are created equal. It threw verbal veils over the anti-democratic nature of the Trump campaign and its potential to become a destructive presidency.

If the media were indeed careful watchdogs who made the truth loud and digestible, Trump would not be incumbent president right now. The truth is that Trump and the creators of Project 2025 who work closely with him plan to attack education, civil rights, public health and the financial stability of the working and middle classes. The truth is that Trump is a felon, a rapist, an insurrectionist and a dictator’s best friend.

The truth is also that economists favored Kamala Harris’ economic plan throughout her campaign trail. The truth is that Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, and her administration would not have been a mere extension of his. In their inability to communicate these truths to Americans, the Democratic party and the Harris campaign bear immense fault as well.

But there are thanks to be given, to those who walked clear-headedly to the polls on Nov. 5 – cutting through media fog, Democratic miscommunication and far-right misinformation – to cast a vote for all of America. For example, 86% of LGBTQ+ voters cast ballots for Harris, according to an NBC exit poll. Black women voted more unitedly for Vice President Harris than any other demographic, with an 89% blue majority, per the AP. 

I acknowledge that Donald Trump fairly won the 2024 presidential election by both electoral keys and popular vote. That’s the bare-minimum required of me, and I’ll give it up with as much grace as Vice President Harris did in her concession speech, with all the grace that Trump believes is beneath him.

But if you filled in a bubble next to his name this November, my only hope for you is that four years from now, you’ll be able to into the eyes of the people you voted against – your wife, your daughter, your sister, your union, your friends of color, your queer and trans classmates, immigrant neighbors, your non-Christian colleagues and many more – and tell them you regret it.