This election is Joever
Editor’s note: This article represents the opinions of the author and does not reflect the views of The Mesa Legend or Mesa Community College.
Let’s face it: the Democratic bid for the 2024 presidential election was doomed from the start.
To say that this presidential election season was a tragicomedy for the history books is the understatement of the century. Not even Quentin Tarantino could come up with a production this chaotic.
I think I speak for a lot of Americans when I say that we knew the writing was on the wall for two crotchety geriatrics battling it out once more as soon as former President Donald Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden announced their candidacies.
And that they did, in a televised debate back in late June. In one corner, we have arguably the most confident propagator of misinformation and disinformation in recent memory. In the other, we had one of the most depressing displays of cognitive inability I have ever seen from any world leader in my life.
Hardly a battle in the age of both information and misinformation. It’s almost as if you could hear every critically thinking world citizen contemplating, is this really the best the United States could come up with?
But then in a twist whose revolutionary magnitude has not been seen since M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening,” Biden dropped out of the race in late July and Vice President
Kamala Harris subsequently stepped up to the plate.
To first understand just how doomed her current bid for the position is, let’s take a look at Israel’s U.S.-funded retaliation to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.
We can argue all day about whether or not Israel has the right to defend itself, but I would imagine the average level-headed Democrat thinks that the Palestinian population death toll, as Al Jazeera reports, that is at the very least around 40,000, many of whom aren’t old enough to acquire a driver’s license here (according to the CIA’s World Factbook), is pretty far past self-defense.
Democrats are divided over Israel and the number of Democratic voters calling for an end to the Biden administration funding much of the IDF-driven conflict has only grown since then.
A report from the Council on American-Islamic Relations shows that Muslim voters are conflicted and shifting further and further towards a vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein, a staunch pro-Palestinian candidate. Such an inopportune time for Michigan to be a swing state with a large Muslim population.
But you may be wondering: since Harris is still leading in the polls, what is there really for Democrats to be worried about?
I would hope that it is common knowledge that the popular vote doesn’t win presidential elections, but rather the electoral college vote. That has been the only way Republicans could be president for years now, according to Reuters.
If you remember the 2016 presidential election, you might remember how Hillary Clinton had a pretty safe lead in the nationwide polls against Trump and still lost on Election Day. Could it be that Trump’s support was artificially low because right-leaning groups did not want to admit they would choose a reality TV star over a politically experienced woman? Possibly.
A similar situation happened to Tom Bradley, a 1982 gubernatorial candidate from California. Bradley, a Black man, was leading the polls, only to lose come Election Day. The resulting theory was nicknamed the Bradley effect because pollsters concluded that tested groups could have been concerned about being perceived as racist for favoring white candidate George Deukmejian.
Though the theory’s current validity is disputed, that doesn’t stop me from thinking something to this effect played some kind of role in why Clinton went so quickly from seemingly having it in the bag to underperforming in key swing states.
Not only does Harris have the political and societal disadvantage of being a woman running against a man in a country where gender inequality is still very real, but a woman of color with partial Black ancestry.
Polling from Reuters/Ipsos indicates that Harris is losing votes at an alarming rate from men of color, a base that the Pew Research Center showed likely would have favored Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Let’s call a spade a spade and say that this is over the simple fact that Obama is a man.
While this country has come a long way in issues such as racism and sexism, I don’t believe that it has come far enough for most male voters, especially white men, to take a Black woman with opinions in the country’s biggest leadership position seriously. Black women have historically not been characterized well, and things have not changed much in the leadership department since, according to a University of British Columbia study.
As much as Democrats are clinging to Harris’s campaign for dear life, I think that it’s about time that they prepare for another four years of incessant executive ordering and tweeting.
Dare I say this election is Joever?
