Kelly B.

I was born in New Jersey and first moved to Vermont when I was three. Before I was born, my mom had this kickass job at Sports Illustrated, but she was a stay-at-home mom when I was growing up. My dad owned his own landscaping company. When we packed up and moved to Southern Vermont, we ended up in this really small town, called Rupert. I think there might still be no cellphone service out there. The general store was the center of town. We literally went to elementary school in a two-room schoolhouse, with more than one grade together in the same room. We lived on a farm. It was a beautiful place to grow up, but it was a fairly poor area, with a lot of working-class Vermonters using the land to make a living. We grew up playing hockey and soccer, skiing and snowboarding, and enjoying the outdoors. When I was a freshman in high school, my parents divorced. We lived mostly with my mom, and spent weekends with my dad. I was the oldest, so I was like my mom’s right-hand woman. Mom went back to work in communications and back to doing what she really loved. I went to college in upstate New York and then moved to D.C. The oldest of my younger brothers joined the military. My younger twin brothers will both be sophomores at the University of Vermont this fall. They’ve been working since they were 16 to help pay for school. My dad works in the Vermont local food movement.

My family is not particularly political. I have to argue with them to get them to the polls. I talk to my mom pretty much every day on the phone and I feel like our conversations are helping her have a political renaissance of her own, which has been great to watch. It’s kind of the opposite of what you usually hear. I’m actually helping to bring my mom on board for Hillary Clinton, and she’s coming around, which has been really exciting. She shares my outlook on a lot of stuff. She’s a single mom and raised four kids. She’s a huge inspiration to me. We’ve had some really substantive conversations about Hillary and why I care so much about this, and why she should too. It’s been really nice to know that she does understand, and that we can have these conversations. It turns out that she has a lot more reasons to be active than she even knows.

There have been all of these headlines recently about single millennial women and how we have more power right now as an organizing entity than we’ve ever had in an election cycle. People are treating us like we’re this homogenous group and we’re all the same, and when they’re talking about Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders, it’s all about Hillary’s “millennial woman problem” and “Bernie’s attracting young voters” and what people aren’t understanding is that we are so diverse.

As a Vermonter and a progressive, I’m someone who demographically fits the mold of a Bernie Sanders supporter. But I really believe Hillary’s the candidate who will be able to get us to that progressive end goal. We all want the same things as progressives, but she can get us there and Bernie can’t. If I want to think about this election through the lens of the three things that are most important to me, that’s my access to reproductive health care, my student loan debt, and equal pay. “Breaking up the big banks” can’t fix all three of those things. I have a brother in the military. He’s being deployed in a month. My twin brothers are going to college right now. I’m still paying off my student loan debt, and thinking a lot about my financial future and stability. There are a lot of things at play right now that are important to me and make up my identity, and I’m just one millennial and one woman. We’ve seen so much attention paid to this stereotype of who millennials are, but are people really taking the time to dive a little bit deeper?

When I hear people say they don’t care about the fact that she’s a woman, that’s completely wrong to me. A lot of people care that she’s a woman. I think a lot of voters understand that there are issues she would bring to the table that will always be at the front of her mind — because she’s a woman — that just aren’t a part of the conversation right now. You can bet your ass that would change if there was a woman as president — it shifts the status quo no matter what.

But I’m not in a mold. I’m not in a vacuum. I’m not voting for her just because she’s a woman. I absolutely believe that Hillary Clinton is the only candidate who is able to pursue a progressive agenda and reach the end goal of making that vision a reality.

One of the really personal connections I have to all of this is that when we first moved to Vermont, my youngest brother, the youngest of the twins, was diagnosed with cancer and my parents didn’t have health insurance. Fortunately, he got covered through a state health insurance program in Vermont that was actually created by the first woman governor of our state, Madeleine Kunin. That program saved his life. And coincidentally, Bernie Sanders tried to run against Governor Kunin the year before she signed it into law. If she hadn’t gotten that done, my brother might not have gotten the treatment he needed. And then Hillary Clinton got the Children’s Health Insurance Program passed a few years later, so kids in other parts of the country would get the same protection.

I wasn’t alive when Governor Kunin ran against Bernie, but the whole rhetoric he had back then urging “voters not to vote for [her] just because [she’s] a woman,” the same rhetoric he has today — that alarms me. Bernie has voted against the Brady bill five times — and when you look at the numbers when it comes to gun violence against women in Vermont, his narrative starts to crack under pressure. If you continue to look at those kinds of inconsistencies, you see someone who is just like other establishment politicians. If the economy is the hardline issue for him, and women’s issues and LGBTQ issues and race issues are all off to the side — if you’re saying that you’ll fix the economy and the benefits of that will just somehow magically trickle down to everybody — I’m not buying that.

And that’s one of many reasons why I’m not with him. #ImWithHer

-As told to #ShesWithUs