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I Can’t Believe I Have to Vote for Joe Biden

Democratic women are once again being asked to help save the country by voting for a deeply problematic man

Jessica Valenti
GEN
Published in
4 min readApr 14, 2020

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Joe Biden. Photo: NurPhoto/Getty Images

OnOn election night in 2016, my six-year-old daughter and I wore matching “feminist” T-shirts, ordered a pizza, and sat glued in front of the television with my mother. Assuming three generations of women were about to watch the first female president be elected, I bought a bottle of champagne. (It’s still sitting in a dusty corner of my bar.)

This November, there won’t be buzzy excitement or matching T-shirts with my daughter. On election day, my choice will be between Donald Trump, a dangerous bigot who has been credibly accused of rape, sexual assault, and harassment by more than two dozen women over a more than four-decade period, and Joe Biden, a man recently accused of sexually assaulting a Senate aide in the 1990s, and who has made fun of the women who complained about his penchant for unwanted shoulder rubs.

Biden is the better choice by a mile, and I’ll do what’s right for the country and vote for him. But I’m still furious: I can’t believe that when faced with the most dangerous president of our lifetime, Democrats are moving ahead with a nearly 80-year-old moderate who has shown himself time and…

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Jessica Valenti
GEN
Writer for

Feminist author & columnist. Native NYer, pasta enthusiast.