Partisan Identification

My Earliest Memories of Political Parties

Everybody has a political party preference, this is an identification that is typically shaped in childhood, leading to partisanship that plays a crucial role in voter participation. With increased party polarization, the previous party performance stemming from significant issues set at play by cultural, social, economic, and political differences, set the trajectory for individual’s political choices. These forces are often long-term, typically informally learned through parents; for me, my parent’s political ideologies very much shaped how I grew up to view the Democratic and Republican parties. The dynamics have morphed over the years to have more cognitive backing to my perceived view of our political system, however, they still fit into the left camp—more particularly, the Democratic Party.

A few years before I was born, my parents became Jehovah’s Witnesses, and as part of the religion, they did not get involved in politics. However, just because they couldn’t vote or politically participate in some other way didn’t mean that they didn’t keep up with current events and the political dynamics of the time. I was born in 1993 and remember being aware that Bill Clinton was president throughout the late 90s but I was not aware of the link to parties just yet. The 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was the first time I became aware of political parties, as my parents stayed up watching the election results on CNN and kept up with the aftermath revolving around the Florida recount. This somewhat stayed neutral—even though my parents were hoping Gore won—but this paled in comparison to the 9/11 terrorist attack (which I partly watched on the news as I was getting ready for school) and the wars that followed. This was the first time I became fully aware of politics and the power it holds over our lives, along with consequences and people’s opinions around parties.

My parents were to the idea that the Republican administration always created chaos in the economy and started wars because of political interests cloaked in “a greater good” even though it was none of our business to be in those other countries. They were or less tied to the Democratic Party because as Hispanic immigrants, they viewed it as the party of minority rights and the party that was “nicer” or more “welcoming” to immigrants. However, just like many people, my parents didn’t fit the cookie-cutter polarized definition of a democratic voter of today, they weren’t neatly placed into the box. My parents are/were pro-life, view institutionalized racism with skeptical lenses along with racial equity incentives, and only recently LGTBQ+ friendly—which shows how views can often be malleable. With this changing concept in mind, my dad was pretty supportive of Barack Obama as our president, up until there was a radical change, the 2008 financial crash. As my dad lost his job without notice and it took him three months to find another one, he was unable to keep up with the house payments. However, there was a program set up by the Obama administration that aided homeowners in resuming payments with the banks. Although my dad qualified, the banks refused to follow through repeatedly; as a result, my dad misplaced his anger towards Bank of America on the Democratic Party and particularly Obama. Since then, my dad is no longer Jehovah’s Witness but continues not to vote, however, he expresses more support for the Republican Party since.

Although I’ve not had a drastic experience with either party or blame one particular party over another for major events (with the exception being the recent efforts by some Republicans to overthrow our democracy by disrupting the peaceful transfer of power for the 2020 elections), I still lean heavily Democratic. Although I remain unaffiliated in my voter registration, I’ve always voted Democratic, which makes me question why I don’t just register as a Democrat. My reasoning for keeping my options open is that I don’t necessarily love everything the Democratic Party does, and if there are ever Republican candidates that more closely align with my views, I’d be more than willing to vote for them (even though it hasn’t happened yet). In conclusion, I’m not an “always blue no matter who” (which is easier on the voter to have a rough ideological background of the party when voting) type of person, but it has been always blue this far in my life.