Former Vice President Joe Biden is running for president in the 2020 election and he is in the lead against his Democratic colleagues in the polls. This lead is going to hurt the Democrats’ race to remove President Trump from office and the party needs to see that there are better candidates to choose from.
This is not the first time Biden has dipped his toes in the pool for president. According to ABC News in Oct. 2015, Biden ran for president in 1984. After Former Vice President Walter Mondale took the Democratic nominee seat in the election, Biden lost his chance at the presidency and Ronald Reagan won the election that year. Biden lost the nominee seat again in 1988, this time to Dem. Governor Michael Dukakis. After being forced to stay seated in the as a senior senate for 20 years, Biden finally got into the White House was with President Barack Obama, serving as the Vice President from 2009-2017.
Time has changed things drastically for the performance and opinions of Democrats and Republicans alike. More extreme beliefs are beginning to define the political parties, dividing them drastically. This divide is leading to an ease in differentiating which candidates are a better fit, allowing voters to be lazy and simply vote for their party.
The Democratic Party needs a proper representative. 46% of millenials identify as Democratic or Democratic leaning,as well as 56% of women and 67% of black people, according to the Pew Research Center. Biden, a 76-year-old white cisgender male, doesn’t fulfil thequalfications of being an empowered minority nor does he bring diversity to the country’s elected demographic. Of the top seven democratic candidates in the poll, according to The Hill, the four that fit the mold of being a minority are Sen. Cory Booker, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kamala Harris, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Most notable is Mayor Buttigieg, more commonly known as Mayor Pete, an openly gay man who is the first millennial to run for president. Baby Boomers have dominated the political realm for the past few decades. This year is the first year that millennials have started to outnumber all other generations, barely bypassing the Boomers. Both generations currently sit at 73 million people each according to Pew Research Center. Of all 431 congress members, there are 26 millennials, which is disproportionate to the population. So, having a millennial in the presidential running would help reflect the values of the country’s largest generation that is dramatically underrepresented. That is something Biden is not capable of doing and has not expressed interest in, especially considering that almost half of his party’s supporters are scores younger than him. What is needed is people as passionate as Mayor Pete and the famous Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), to be representing the population most effectively and universally.
Biden’s centrist views and lack of diversity are not the only details hampering his lack of proper representation. The Anita Hill controversy, regarding Biden’s handling of her testimony, still lingers as a testament to his character. Since then, there have also been multiple allegations of Biden making women uncomfortable with unsolicited touching, grabbing, and hair-sniffing. Lingering “a little bit too long,” is what Caitlyn Caruso said, when she spoke with The New York Times. These allegations are horrendous for Biden’s reputation because female voters can relate to how uncomfortable the women visibly are in the footage online. The people should have trust in their president and when someone that could make it to that position makes others visibly uncomfortable, it is hard to trust them. Politics should be exceptionally clean of easily avoided controversial matters like sexual touching and illegal activity and many of our politicians are. In that case, why should someone be the exception to the rule at such a high political position in our country?.
What we are seeing from the Democrats right now are what we saw from the Whig party in the early 1800s. A populist much like President Trump was elected to office, and he’s the face Americans see on the $20 bill: President Andrew Jackson. When Jackson was running for office, the Whig party could only agree on hating Jackson, just as the Democrats are doing right now with President Trump. Ask any democrat today what their number one goal is with this election and their answer is going to be to remove President Trump from office. In the Democrats’ eyes, anyone that isn’t Trump will suffice in office but what the Democrats are choosing to ignore is that fact that another white man with political experience is not enough to sway an election like this. The people need shocking and new, and Democrats are presumptuous in thinking that Biden’s experience is enough to sway voters into thinking that Biden can fix the corruption President Trump caused. The people probably do not care about how experienced their elected official is; they chose a showman in 2016. Democratic constituents want to vote for someone that is like them, and a centrist older white man is not the best option, especially when other candidates like Sanders, Buttigieg and Harris are available. A democracy cannot be run by simply thriving on presumptions rather than getting votes on policy.
