The Rhode Island voter who’s voting for Biden because she believes Trump is an ‘environmental racist’

Polarized is a weekly series featuring voters in all 50 states sharing their thoughts on the 2020 elections. Click here to read more from this project.

Lauren Niedel made a pact with her mother for the 2020 presidential elections: if her mom voted for Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries, she would cast her ballot for whoever won the party’s nomination — including Joe Biden.

She wasn’t exactly happy when the former vice president became the nominee, the 58-year-old Democratic voter in Rhode Island says in a recent interview with The Independent. But her mother certainly was.

Niedel’s mom is based in Florida, and supported the former vice president’s bid for the White House over Sanders,  her daughter’s preferred candidate. Niedel voted for the Vermont senator during his presidential campaign in 2016, and even wrote him in when Hillary Clinton went up against Donald Trump.

But she says there’s just too much on the line in 2020 for the country to re-elect Trump, who she describes as “ disgusting… he’s arrogant, he’s a misogynist, he’s a habitual liar” and notes how she believes the president is “destroying the environment and nobody seems to be able to focus on that at all”.

For Niedel, a progressive Democrat, “environmental racism” and climate change are two key issues this electoral cycle. As a Rhode Island voter, global warming hits close to home.

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A Democratic state committee member, Niedel says she’s seen the impact of climate change firsthand.

“Rhode Island’s shoreline is going to be decimated over the next 20 years and there will be a huge loss of the iconic fish and quahogs that make [the state] famous,” she says. “Water rising is probably going to hurt our shoreline: Newport, Westerly, places near the coast. Rhode Island is sort of a peninsula: we’re surrounded by water.”

She fought on a campaign to stop a frack gas power plant in the town next to her, a five-year venture the local group of environmental activists won in 2019.

But she says there is still so much work left to be done — and even though she doesn’t like Trump, she says she has virtually no faith in Biden, either.

“I don’t think he’ll have the will. I think he’s just talking the talk right now to appease Bernie Sanders and his supporters,” Niedel says. “But I think when push comes to shove, the… oil companies and their lobbyists will steer him in another direction, along with the other moderate Republicans and ‘Republican-lites’ that are invading the Democratic Party.”

Even if Niedel didn’t have the pact with her mother to vote for Biden in the upcoming election, she says she likely would have cast her ballot for the Democratic nominee regardless.

She says Trump has failed in “just about every way,” from the fires burning in California, to the coronavirus pandemic and ongoing racial tensions and national protests.

“He basically wants to destroy the environmental beauty of this country — and the world, for that matter,” she says. “His lack of caring about the environment is despicable. When he says he wants the ‘greatest water’ and the ‘greatest air’ out there, he does absolutely nothing.”

“He’s done nothing to stop environmental racism,” she adds, calling the president an “environmental racist” who has “done nothing to support local and state initiatives to curtail greenhouse gases.”

At the end of the day, this voter says that even though Biden may not appeal to her most progressive ideologies, she still thinks the Democratic nominee will be “much, much better” than Trump when it comes to issues like the environment, transit and infrastructure, among other domestic and international issues.

“It’s not a hard decision,” she says, about voting for Biden. “But mostly his vision is ‘not Trump’ … Does he have a shot? I think he has a shot. But I am very, very concerned about voter disenfranchisement, about electoral fraud, about voter intimidation.”