Thursday on Texas Southern University’s campus, eight Democratic presidential candidates will take part in the She the People Presidential Forum. The eight candidates are Sen. Cory Booker, former U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
And that’s not even everyone running for the Democratic nomination. According to the New York Times, there are twenty-one announced candidates for the nomination (not including Joe Biden who will probably announce this week).
Here is the issue with all of this: there are far too many cooks in the kitchen at this point. And, even with that, it’s only April — April of 2019. The election is not until November 2020, and there are a lot of primaries and debates in between then and now.
Everyone and their mother
Tomorrow the forum might be interesting. But the fact that there are eight candidates attending which is only about a third of all candidates is ridiculous. To put that into perspective, in 2016 seventeen candidates ran for the Republican presidential candidate. And even then the field was far too crowded and made very little sense for that many candidates to be involved.
The fact that someone legitimately told Mayor Wayne Messam or Rep. Seth Moulton or Mariane Williamson that they have any chance of winning is kind of ridiculous. These people are the Gov. Jim Gilmore of this campaign – they’re only here to give The Onion content on a slow news day.
The problem with the 2016 Republican primaries was that there were far too many people for anyone who was not Trump to make a significant impact on the people. There is sometimes far too much noise for anyone who has no chance to make their voice heard.
There are lanes for certain candidates, and they have to fight in their line; like Sen. Sanders with progressives or Mayor Buttigieg with moderates. There are certain candidates that are going to win their lane, and everyone else is just an extra, added voice that clogs up the airwaves.
Someone in this field of candidates needs to realize that they don’t really have a chance to beat President Trump. And we do not need an undercard debate again, because watching the undercard debates was grueling.
Far too early
The first candidate to announce for the Republican candidacy was Sen. Ted Cruz on March 23, 2015. The next candidate to announce was Sen. Rand Paul on April 7, 2015. Those were the only two candidates who had announced at this time in 2015.
And yet there are 21 candidates running now. Remembering 2016, at the end of the primaries most of America was done with politics and wanted November just to happen. But then we still had five months to listen to President Trump and Hillary Clinton battle each other.
It’s April and I think I have been hearing about who is running for President since sometime last year. Honestly, we’ve been talking about who is running in 2020 since the end of the 2016 election.
By the end of this election cycle, America is going to be exhausted from the amount of politics it will be forced to ingest. Some of these primary candidates need to do the right thing and drop out.
For the good of American sanity, it’s far too early, there are too many candidates, someone drop out. Someone will send you a fruit basket.
Opinion Editor Jorden Smith is a political science and creative writing senior and can be reached at [email protected].