Sanaa A.
When I tell people I’m from Kentucky, they kind of do a double take. I self-identify as Pakistani, American, and Muslim. Especially post-9/11, I started being more aware of my surroundings, of being the minority in the classroom and following a faith that not many people around me followed. As I grew up and became a teenager, I realized that [my religion] was something very different that not a lot of people here knew about.
College really changed my whole idea of what it was that I wanted to do. Growing up, I wasn’t very politically-minded. But I understood how conservative Kentucky was in 2008. I was a hardcore Obama supporter in 2008 — my whole family was. But I’m probably the most liberal out of all of the adults in my immediate family. Quite honestly, when I was growing up, I supported abortion rights just in cases of rape or incest or when the life of the woman was at stake. When I went to college, I still remember the day that I had the epiphany, “Who am I to decide when a woman should take advantage of her health care rights? Who am I to decide when she has an abortion? That ultimately should be up to her.”
After graduating, I moved back home to Kentucky and started seeing signs for Alison Lundergan Grimes all over my hometown. So for me it was seeing those signs and doing a little bit of research and realizing, this is a big Senate race. She’s going up against Mitch McConnell, who’s been in Congress for years. This is a big deal. If she were able to beat him that would be revolutionary — the overthrowing of the establishment guy.
At that point I was working a part-time job, trying to look for opportunities in D.C., but I had nothing to do in the evenings, so I signed up to be a volunteer with the Grimes campaign and started phone banking every week and knocking on doors on weekends, and from there — because I was volunteering so much — I was eventually offered a field organizer position. I just loved talking to people, I loved knocking on doors. There was a certain sense of energy gained just from having a good conversation, even with someone who was undecided or wasn’t sure about the candidate. I got to organize my home county, which was great because it taught me so many things not just about the candidate, but about my hometown as well. After it was over, after Grimes lost, my first thought was that I was not done, and I wanted to finish what I had started, which was electing more progressive women.
In college, I didn’t think that I wanted to be in politics. Even now, politics is not a forever kind of thing for me. But this is what I love about it: that you put so much effort and energy into a candidate or a talking point and when it works and it’s successful you can’t even measure the success or the difference it makes in people’s lives. Then you do have those moments where you put 150 percent in and work 24/7 for a candidate because you believe in them, and it ends in a loss, which is crushing. But you have to keep moving on. It’s never about one politician or candidate. In the end, you’re part of a movement.
I like the fact that because I’m more educated now and because I’ve learned the personal stories of women we’ve helped elect — and the kind of progress that they’ve made for a lot of other women in this country — I’ve become more comfortable being very “out” about my support for abortion rights. Coming from my cultural background, abortion just isn’t talked about. But working at EMILY’s List has taught me not to treat abortion or reproductive health care as a taboo subject.
At least from my perspective, trying to represent an entire generation of 18-to-34-year-olds is a daunting task. Millennials are diverse. We prioritize issues in different ways. There are certain things we have in common like affordability and quality of education. For me in particular, it’s all about access to reproductive health care and gun control, just because at least for me personally there are very commonsense goals involved with each one. They’re individual issues of safety. Choice doesn’t just stop at reproductive rights. It extends to everything. We as individual women (and specifically as millennial women) have the freedom to choose how we want to live our lives. And a woman has the right to choose when it comes to her safety and her economic security. I think it’s really unfair of people to point out that just because you have a certain profile, you have to vote for the candidate who’s like you — like when people say I’m just supporting Hillary Clinton because she’s a woman.
One of the biggest things for me is yes, Hillary being a woman running for president is a revolutionary idea, but that’s of course not the only reason I’m voting for her. I’m voting for her because I think she’s someone who is going to be more proactive than reactive about women’s health care and gun control. It’s one thing to be a good dependable vote, and an ally, and a supporter, but it’s another to stand up to the kind of Congress and the kind of extreme conservatives we have right now and say, “No, this is not going to happen, and these are my plans to make progress.”
She is the leader that we need so that our amazing Senate candidates can win, so that our House candidates can get in there and start getting work done. Not having her as the nominee would definitely hurt the rest of the ballot. And that’s going even lower on the ballot, to state legislatures, which I think are really the powerhouses of revolution in this country. When it comes to redistricting and people’s right to vote, when it comes to reproductive health care and local gun control laws, that’s where it all happens. And Hillary, in my view, is the unifying force. So #ImWithHer
-As told to #ShesWithUs
