The 2016 presidential election will be remembered as a turning point in American history. Between the surprise election of President Donald Trump, the popularity of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and the unusual interest taken in third-party libertarian Gary Johnson, voters in the United States have made it clear they want a candidate who is not the two-party poster boy they are so used to seeing. The American people felt their views were not being represented in 2016 and responded by supporting political outsiders. Going into 2020, many Americans still have those same feelings of misrepresentation.

In 2020,  people will still be looking for a different kind of candidate, but not a political outsider. The American people want a genuine person who does not have extreme views or a “screw you” attitude and has the will to put the American people above their party’s platform. The American people are tired of change only existing as the tool to gain support for status-quo politicians and want to see true change in the U.S. government.

If the 2018 midterms elections are a sign of how the Americans will vote in 2020, there
will be more support for politically moderate presidential candidates. Although many news sources touted the “Blue Wave” as the main storyline to come out of the 2018 midterm elections, there is a more interesting story to take away. The midterm elections showed, regardless of political affiliation, candidates who expressed more moderate or centrist views were elected in greater numbers than their hard-left or hard-right peers. The popularity of moderate politicians is a direct response to the political extremism that has come to characterize American politics.

There are already several Democratic politicians who have announced their candidacy for president, including Sanders. There are no Republican candidates thus far who have declared their candidacy besides Trump. As far as independents go, Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, has declared a potential presidential bid, but his theoretical candidacy has not been met positively by the public.

In the end, the American people are looking for a moderate candidate who will keep the United States out of gratuitous foreign affairs and, most importantly, fix the many domestic
issues Americans face daily. Universal health care, often called Obamacare, is not efficient and nothing has been done to fix or repair the program since its rollout at the end of Obama’s second term. The digital divide is still affecting millions of poor and rural Americans, who are lagging behind the rest of the country because of their inability to access the
internet. Companies are no longer incentivized by the government to provide pension programs, and there has been no government action to correct this. Additionally, the United States is still suffering from an epidemic of heroin abuse. 

In 2020, the American people want a presidential candidate who represents the people first and their political party second, a genuine person who wants to save their country before they try to save the world.

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