Let me start by saying that I am not trying to get anyone to vote for or against any candidate.  I admit, I voted for Bernie in the Democratic Primary, and I am a registered Democrat and have been since Obama ran for president the first time.  I also admit I have never been a supporter of Hillary, and have never voted for her in any primary or for senate.  With that being said, I am going to explain my fears, and what I hope people will do with the non-presidential races.

Our presidential candidates this year really have been poor overall.  Ignoring the multitudes that were lost during the primaries, we are left with two major party candidates this year that really don't instill any trust in the system we have set up.  First, lets look at the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.  He has gotten this far because of fear, a good social media game, and free publicity through the press that did not believe he could win and couldn't believe he actually said what he said.  He also benefited from a very weak, large, and fractured primary... nobody that consistently polls under 40% or has such low favorable numbers should ever have won a primary.  The stars aligned and he did.  What scares me is that if he wins, he continues being the same person that he was during the campaign.  That will harm our countries reputation, and would likely bring us to multiple brinks of war.  The scariest thing though is the number of his supporters that support him because he "says what they're thinking."  He is saying a large number of racist and bigoted things.  Even if we go with Nate Silver's early estimates of actual support at the start of the primary season being around 8% of the total population... that's 8% that act like white nationalists, aka the KKK, aka the Nazis and Neo-Nazis.  While they may not act on it, they hold those beliefs.  That right there says we need to do a lot more work to improve the race relations within this country... and not just between whites and blacks, but between all races.  We also need to greatly improve religious tolerance too, between all religions, but especially the Evangelical and Muslim communities.

The Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, is also not that good of a candidate.  She and her husband both have a history with skirting the law.  There are so many examples in the past where they were investigated and "exonerated" because of lack of cooperation or because it was just not up to the burden of proof for an indictment. I personally find it difficult to believe that a couple that has had so many brushes with the law didn't do something that most would consider a crime.  That said though, there has been no criminal indictment for Hillary, so she shouldn't be disqualified for that.  My dislike of her though started with her carpet-bagging the senate seat.  She is not a New Yorker.  The only reason she moved to New York is so she could enter the senate when there was a vacant seat in a heavily democratic state.  She was planning a path to the presidency from the final days of her husband's term, and the senate seat was the way there.  She didn't really do anything as a senator, she did whatever the senior senator, and camera hog, Chuck Schumer wanted her to do.  I can't complain though about her time as Secretary of State, she had to travel the world so much to fix the harm that the Bush presidency did to our reputation and had to carry out the president's agenda, not hers.  The whole email server thing though shows us her tendency for secrecy and desire for control.  To any reasonable observer you could see that setting up an email server outside of the state department would not be a great idea if it became publicly known.  The security may not meet the same minimum standards, people will send you things that shouldn't be sent on unclassified systems, and if it got out, there would surely be an investigation considering how partisan Washington is right now.  She wanted control of her stuff, and she wanted to keep all her stuff out of prying eyes.  This is 100% counter to the law and policies for retainment of official documents.  She got caught, and so began a series of changing reasons.  She kept changing the lie, and now the FBI set their version of the record out, and she will have to change her story to match it.

In short, Trump is going to do the country a lot of harm, and Clinton has a history of stretching the truth to her advantage until she is caught.  Neither one is really trustworthy, and both will end up with a hostile congress, at least one house if not both.  We are in for another 4 years of gridlock and status quo.

This year, and the highest office for the next 4 years, is essentially fucked, no matter who wins.  I encourage everyone to look at all the candidates, including Johnson and Stine, see where they stand, and vote your conscious.

What really matters though is the state level races.  We all need to work on getting sane people into office at the state and local levels.  We need to remove the people that are corrupt.  I know, I'm in New York, and we have had 2 of the three most powerful people in the state convicted on ethics charges and the noose slowly closing in on the third.  Being a career politician often leads to being a corrupt politician.  We need to get new blood into the system.  We need to get people in that will work across the aisle instead of being strictly partisan.  In reality, we need people voted in that will work towards a non-partisan creation of voting districts.  If one looks at the map of the various districts, we have only a small percentage that are actually competitive.  The number has actually gone down over the last few redistrictings.  This leads to more and more partisan and more and more extreme left and right wing candidates winning the district, which then leads to more and more partisanship in congress.  They districts are echo chambers, and that is not a good thing.  

We also need to stop listening to our own echo chambers.  On social media we have made it so that we only hear what we want to hear, and we don't listen to the other sides out there.  This has lead us to become more and more polarized as a people.  We need to start listening to everyone and giving everyone a fair shake.  We need to have civil arguments with each other so we know how the other sides see the issues, and maybe, just maybe, we can actually find a common ground on many of them.  This is not going to be easy to do.  It is something that we need to start doing.  Try starting by looking at multiple new sources, especially from well established, reputable, and moderate news sources.  Yes, you can also look at your MSNBC, but you should also look at Fox News to balance them out.  The more information you have, from multiple sources, the more likely you will find the moderate version which is likely closer to the truth.

So, in summary, vote your conscious this fall, we're fucked and will likely maintain the status quo for the next four years no matter who wins.  Work on getting new blood and moderate blood into the system, especially those that will support a truly non-partisan redistricting after the 2020 census.  Finally, get yourself out of your own echo chamber and actually listen and talk to the other side.