Why this Democratic voter 'loves Uncle Joe' but still supports Bernie Sanders

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Cecelia Garrett has spent her days in isolation amid the coronavirus pandemic working to secure travel arrangement and safe housing for queer youth, who have nowhere to go after their schools were forced to shut down.

The 46-year-old Democratic voter, who goes by CeCe, runs a crisis phone line with her husband, and says the pandemic has brought uncertainty and fear to quuer students who cannot return home from their dorms during the crisis. The couple moved to Mississippi to start an LGBTQIA-affirming ministry and crisis response team after 2011 saw a wave of suicides and violence.

“Most of these younger people who call us through the crisis line end up kind of becoming like our family,” she says in a recent interview with The Independent. “We have an open table at every holiday: every Christmas and Thanksgiving our house is packed, we’ve gone to weddings to be stand-in parents, I get phone calls for births, deaths — I’m basically their mom.”

After making the city of Hattiesburg her home base, CeCe says she built a network of queer youth who have become an essential part of her life.

She says she uses the money she makes from an Etsy shop, where she sells a creative array of products, to fund her work for the crisis line.

“I’m not, like amazing,” she adds with a laugh. “I’m just trying not to be a sh** person.”

Not being able to take in some of those younger people during the pandemic has been hard on CeCe, who has underlying illnesses and lives with her mother, meaning her house has been in what calls a “lockdown.”

“That’s been particularly difficult for me, because I’m a fixer,” she says.

When it comes to her top priorities, CeCe says one is fighting for those “who have been left to fend for themselves.”

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The coronavirus pandemic has made her even more aware of how important her vote is in the 2020 presidential election — as well as her endorsement for a specific candidate.

“I need to know who I am going to vote for because I have 60 kids — literally — who call me to check in and will inevitably ask who I’m going to vote for and ask for guidance,” she says.

CeCe wants a president who will work towards “ensuring the poor and the elderly and the marginalized” receive equitable treatment in society, she says, adding: “I have made peace with the fact that I am probably a democratic socialist … but if we are judged by the way we treat the marginalized, then we are failing and we are failing fantastically.”

CeCe wants a president who will solidify housing as a human right, extend and increase the minimum wage, and fight for progressive causes.

“Basically, what I’m looking for is common sense but radical approaches to not just equality, but equity,” she says.

And despite his recent losses in early voting states like Mississippi, CeCe has found her candidate: “I’m supporting Bernie, 100 per cent.”

CeCe supports Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination because, according to her, the Vermont senator “has been asking for intersectional revolutionary equity and equality for 40 years.”

The Democrat says she voted for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections, and adds that she was excited to vote for her candidacy.

“I saw no way of Donald Trump actually winning, it was a laughable thought for me,” she says.

Whereas she wasn’t interested in Sanders’ candidacy back then, CeCe explains why she has moved towards being one of his supporters in recent years: “We have come to this watershed moment as a nation, where we have a racist, misogynistic Twitter troll as a president, and he is literally damaging our country... every day that he is in office.”

“I just don’t feel that a status quo Democrat is going to be the change that we need to repair the damage that has been done,” she adds.

I ask CeCe if she’s hinting at former Vice President Joe Biden when she mentions a “status quo Democrat.” Her response? “Absolutely.”

“I love Uncle Joe, everybody loves Uncle Joe, but I feel like I would feel more comfortable voting for him if he owned his past mistakes and missteps,” CeCe says.

She says she wasn’t surprised when the former vice president swept many states throughout Super Tuesday and even won her own home state, noting his deep connections in the South and the media’s apparent favoring of Biden over Sanders.

“Things can change and I hope that they do,” she says about Sanders’ possibilities in the Democratic primaries. “I hope we see a surge in Bernie’s support, but in order for that to happen I think mainstream media is going to have to start becoming a little more ethical and reporting in more unbiased ways.”

If Sanders doesn’t manage to pull off an unprecedented turnaround, CeCe says a lot of his supporters will be forced to make a difficult choice in voting for Biden.

But CeCe says she has kids who rely on her.

“I have children who were given to me at birth and kids who were acquired along the way,” she says. “I honestly will vote for whoever wins the Democratic nomination because I need safety for the people that I care for. In order to find safety for those folks, Trump needs to be voted out of office.”

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