Logan Ramsey
Editor-in-Chief
At a certain point, you have to admit when you’ve been beaten and recognize when your efforts are hurting a greater good. This appears to be something that the herd of 2020 presidential candidates don’t have a grasp on.
In February of this year, when the candidates started rolling in, I had a conversation with a friend about where the democrats were headed as a party and what their chances were like at defeating Trump. She thought that the number of candidates that had stepped up to face Trump showed fractures in their party and I disagreed. I thought that it was regular for this many challengers to be running and that they would thin out eventually.
Turns out I was wrong. Even early on, the number of candidates who announced a bid was more than you’d expect from an election like this.
As of August 25, we have 21 candidates running for the nomination and the majority of them don’t have a shot. By Feburary, we’ll begin the process of the democratic primaries. That’s only six months away now and we still have 21 candidates running.
My priorities going into this election are simple. I want a candidate who understands the constitution, because our current president has lowered my standards to that. That’s why the amount of presidential candidates running seems unnecessary to me.
There’s enough candidates that the Washington Post made a game out of it. In an article titled ‘How well do you know the democratic candidates?’ you try to match a face to a name of the different candidates. I attempted this quiz and did extremely poor.
Considering that my favorite candidate, Kanye West, delayed his presidential run until 2024, it seems that I have to pick from candidates that actually know the issues. The problem is that there’s just too many of them.
Having candidates that know the issues are important, but it’s also important for the public to see a united party and have a few good options.
If any of you are like me, you remember the hellish rollercoaster that was the 2016 democratic primaries. That ride ended with DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigning in disgrace because of her party’s efforts to push Clinton to the nomination at the expense of Sanders.
The conservative news media overblows Clinton’s scandals, and I actually like her, but she wasn’t as electable of a candidate like Bernie Sanders. While Clinton took the popular vote in the primaries, her supporters weren’t as vivacious as Sanders supporters and her nomination split the party. The door-knocking energy that a Sanders nomination would have seen didn’t exist with Clinton.
The electability of a candidate is everything and the fact that democratic officials favored Clinton is likely the reason that Trump is in office now.
There was a lot that went wrong in the 2016 primaries, and while I hope nothing of that magnitude happens in 2020, it doesn’t present a united front to voters to have 21 candidates in the race.
To be clear, I fully expect most of them to thin out sometime between now and six months away. We have plenty of time for them to reach that conclusion, but their participation in the race right now is hurting the 2020 primaries in the future.
The simple fact of the matter is the more candidates that are running, the more confusing the election is for the general public. I know that I’ve actively avoided doing research on this topic because of that.
Before now, I’ve felt that it was too early to start talking about the 2020 presidential race because it was so far away and we should be focused on the problems of Trump’s presidency. If your basement is flooding, you don’t start work on that new home theater system you’ve always wanted right then.
The problem is that it’s getting much closer now. The public has six months to decide who they want to support going into the primaries. Would it be easier for us to decide between the ones that have a chance or 21 total?
As of right now, it seems the only candidates that have shot at the nomination are Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and maybe Pete Buttigieg. There’s some leeway to that, because there’s enough time that the polls could change, but I think the amount of people running is overwhelming and is making America reluctant to tune in.
I’ve stayed away from the presidential debates this summer because I don’t want to watch a debate with 10 candidates on stage where they can only speak for a minute at a time. It feels like a waste to put so many people on stage who aren’t going to catch up.
Beto O’Rourke was my favorite candidate at the start of his campaigning, but he hasn’t gained any support beyond his initial momentum in the polls even though he’s one of the most well-known candidates in the race. It’s time for O’Rourke to recognize that he’s not going to take the nomination and step down, hopefully signaling to the rest of the candidates that it’s time for them as well.
The candidates are facing a critical deadline. The next presidential debate is on September 12 and 13 and if the least popular candidates can’t make the cut, their chances of gaining any more momentum goes to almost zero. At this point, I don’t see how the person who takes the nomination isn’t Biden, Warren, or Sanders.
The thing is, I don’t care if one of the other candidates comes out of nowhere and takes the nomination, because they’re doing damage to the parties image in the status quo, and that makes it more likely that we’ll have another tumultuous primary when it should be the swiftest and most decisive one in modern history.
The priority right now should be to remove Trump from office, because if we don’t, America’s standing with her allies will continue to weaken, the trade war will continue to hurt the economy, and migrant children will continue to be detained. I would love to be focused on America getting a new home theater system, but right now, we need to get some buckets.
