Major news networks, social media, and student publications like this one are going to look for someone to blame for letting a convicted felon and known fascist liable for sexual abuse back into the White House.
They will blame those pesky pro-Palestinian protesters who just couldn’t look past the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. They will blame Green Party candidate Jill Stein and others who threw their hat into the ring. They will blame Generation-Z men, who have become increasingly estranged from the Democratic Party in recent years. They will blame Chappell Roan, for some reason.
They will blame everyone but themselves. The Democratic Party has failed us, and we will suffer through another Trump presidency because of it.
President Joe Biden is partially to blame, of course, for sticking around in the race until late July. Biden’s cognitive decline has been on full display for the entire country since the 2020 election. Biden was what we needed back then, but to keep him in this race so long was not just irresponsible — it was asinine. It’s quite fitting that the final nail in the coffin for the celebrity-obsessed Democratic Party’s fight to keep Biden on the ballot was seemingly an op-ed by George Clooney, but it got the job done.
Once Biden finally bowed out of the race and was labeled a “great statesman” by his constituents, the Democratic Party failed to hold a true primary election and opted to rush Vice President Kamala Harris into the candidacy.
Now, it is easy to point at other possible candidates and say that they would have outperformed Harris, who is currently losing the popular vote. I am not interested in this speculation at all. You can go to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to read fanfiction about Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer becoming president.
However, there is a lot to be said about taking the choice out of the hands of Americans. A rushed primary would have been possible, and it would put into place the candidate who had the best chance of winning. This candidate may and well have ended up being Harris, but we will never know for sure. The lack of a true primary also strengthened the idea that the Democratic Party was run by a few elites, a claim that Republicans ran with.
Once Harris was in place for the candidacy, though, her campaign strategy would see her frolicking with war criminals and promising to elect a Republican to her cabinet.
As millions of Americans looked to Harris to appeal to the left, she instead ran a diet-Republican campaign. She offered a tough-on-immigration stance and promised to strengthen the southern border. She befriended known torture aficionado and former Vice President Dick Cheney, parading around his daughter and former United States Rep Liz Cheney (R-Wis.). She also offered no real insight into stopping the humanitarian crisis in Palestine, which has a death toll exceeding 43,000.
Harris also flipped on many of her past campaign policies to appeal to the moderate voter. What happened to her 2020 campaign promise of “Medicare for All”? How about gun control? Oh, and then she appears on 60 Minutes, boasting about owning a Glock? What about her promise on restricting fracking, what happened to that?
Through attempting to appeal to the moderate voter, Harris watered down any promise she once ran on. Simultaneously, she pointed to Republican platforms as the favorable ones, leading voters directly into the lap of former President and President-elect Donald Trump.
I fear the Democratic Party will learn the wrong lesson from this outcome and commit further to the ideals of the American right. The issue was not that Harris appeared too extreme; it was the opposite. She was a candidate running on centrism.
The party needs to recommit to the core values of its base, or it risks losing them for good. I saw these values firsthand as students on our campus flocked in large numbers to the polls to vote for Harris. These students care about healthcare rights, gun control, protecting the rights of queer people, lowering the cost of living, and ending war abroad, not a Dick Cheney endorsement.
Following this historic loss, a misguided overhaul of the Democratic Party will kill it for good.
CONOR SMITH is a junior and former summer Deputy Sports Editor at the Daily Pennsylvanian studying communications from Mount Royal, N.J. His email address is conorfs@sas.upenn.edu.
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