Lately in left-wing politics, there has been a lot of discourse over which candidate would make the best nominee. Disagreement is great when it comes to politics; it is what makes the country function. There has to be some disagreement, or policies would always remain stagnant. There would be no push to move certain issues to the forefront or push others to the background. However, typical discourse has led to avid disagreement and has become toxic hostility, particularly in the case of “Bernie Bros” versus “Warren Stans.” These groups are constantly duking it out with one another on social media, frequently resulting in members of the opposing group being dubbed “snakes” or “liars.” Insults like “racist” and “sexist” have even been thrown around. Frankly, both of these groups have become so blindly spiteful of the other that they fail to recognize the dangers of their words and actions. That being said, one of the biggest mistakes one can make in the upcoming 2020 election is to divide the vote.

Historically, if one candidate got the nomination over another, people who favored the losing candidate would go to the polls and write the name of their candidate instead of voting for the nominee. For example, the election of 1912 was split when Teddy Roosevelt created the Bull Moose Party in order to run on his own ticket. This caused the party to divide, thus resulting in the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. If the vote was not divided, the Republican Party could conceivably have won the presidency that year. More recently, in the 2016 election, a number of voters wrote other candidates’ names on the ticket instead of nominee Hillary Clinton’s. Frustratingly, while Hillary still won the popular vote, the electoral college chose Trump. They did so due to division from third party votes and write-ins, causing the electoral college to allocate fewer delegates to Hillary. If the write-ins and third-party votes had not gotten in the way, the electoral college could have given Hillary more delegates. But, they did, which ultimately led to a Trump presidency.

Even worse, some people felt that their candidate should have won the nomination and to spite the system, they decided not to vote at all. Ignoring the civic duty of voting is not “sticking it to the man” or “proving a point;” it is just making it easier for the opposing party to clinch the victory. If half of Democrats vote for their nominee and the other half neglect the polls while all Republicans vote for Trump, Trump will be a shoe-in for re-election.

Democrats are all united under a common goal: to remove Trump from the presidency and try to undo the damage that he has done. We are all on the same side. That being said, why would it make sense to divide ourselves and prevent one of our own candidates from holding office? Disagreement is understandable, but if we want even a chance at winning this fight, we cannot divide the vote.

Regardless of who you were rooting for in the caucuses, it is imperative that the vote not be divided. The only thing that matters is that once a candidate is chosen for the Democratic nomination, people must show up and vote for the chosen nominee, whether they still like their candidate better or not. We must not divide the Democratic vote, or another four years of ridiculous headlines and racist remarks are ahead.