I’ll start off honestly, I’m not a big fan of either candidate. After watching the two debates, I feel like I watched two toddlers fighting on the playground over who has the best toy truck instead of two educated and professional presidential candidates talking about the future of the United States. Some people are choosing not to vote at all to revolt against the system, but the system won’t change in 7 days. So, in a position where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, who do you choose?

I think everyone can agree we are tired of COVID-19, here some things done or proposed for the future by each candidate. While in office, President Trump has:

• Imposed a travel ban on China.
• Created testing facilities across the country.
• Signed four emergency spending bills, adding up to trillions to address the crisis.

Biden’s plan for the future include:

• Eliminating cost barriers for prevention of and care for COVID-19.
• Pursuing decisive economic measures to help hard-hit workers, families, and small businesses and to stabilize the American economy.
• Restoring trust, credibility, and common purpose.

The details of which can be read in great depth on his COVID plan website.

Both have done good things or plan to do good things when confronting this virus that no one could have expected. Despite this, there are key things that set them apart for me. Donald Trump constantly calls the virus “the China virus” which is not only unprofessional and embarrassing but ignorant to the people of the country. Ever since the virus broke out, Asian Americans have been facing racist jokes and comments about how they started or may be carrying the virus, yet the President continues connecting ethnicity to the virus. The President has also posted many photos from his rallies where large amounts of people are gathered with barely any masks seen in the crowd, going against the guidelines posted on the official White House website. He also joked about Biden wearing a mask at the first debate, then ironically contracted the virus himself. Lastly, there is no clear, cohesive plan for how he plans to combat the virus going forward, and it seems there has not been a laid out plan this whole time.

On the flip side, Joe Biden has a whole webpage describing his full COVID plan. It is important to note that during the Obama-Biden Administration, Biden helped to combat the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 and the Ebola pandemic in 2014. While in the Senate, Biden helped to lead the response to the Great Depression and the Recovery Act. As someone who is ready to finally go to my concert that’s been postponed for 6 months, I need someone to have a plan as to how to get us out of this mess.

Climate change is a huge issue that all of humanity is facing, and the actions of every single country can impact everyone. On Mr. Trump’s website of his accomplishments, he has three things relating to climate. These three things include pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, expanding oil and gas development, and banning oil drilling off the coats of some states. So, basically, he has done one good thing for the climate.

Joe Biden introduced the first climate change bill in the Senate called the Global Climate Protection Act; however, under the Obama administration, it was a bumpy road when it came to the climate. There are a lot of questions surrounding Joe Biden’s climate plan, but the fact that he has one alone is better to me than none at all.

As a student, I’m well aware that Arizona’s public education system has been ranked as the third-worst in the country. That being said, education is a very important topic to me because I’ve never been able to understand how education could just be pushed to the side like this. While both candidates seem to agree your zip-code shouldn’t determine the quality of your education, Donald Trump seems to focus on private education, taking $5 billion from education funding to go towards scholarships for private schools. Meanwhile, Joe Biden wants to triple funding for Title 1 as well as support teachers in ways relating to directly helping to raise their pay but also investing in resources for schools.

These things considered, If I were able to vote, I would be filling in the glorious bubble next to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ names on November 3rd.