DEBATING THE DEMOCRATIC RACE

The 2020 presidental primaries are coming. So far, the campaign makes the 2016 race look less like an animalistic free-for-all, but it sure does look a lot more crowded this time around.

Much like the 2016 debates, the televised 2020 Democratic Party debates have focused on several prominent characters fighting, not only for a crowd of support, but also the policy ideas that they want to implement to benefit the American people. The unfortunate part of these debates is that the crowded stage and poor moderating from the hosts leaves each candidate with less than two minutes to explain a whole policy plan.

In concept that’s nearly impossible – especially if you’re comparing this to Donald Trump’s debate performances in the past, where he stole the spotlight and got the attention of his voters.

In all debates, the three candidates that have got the most media attention, for better or worse, are former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Biden is currently the front-runner as he is running off the success of President Obama’s administration (although that has got him into some trouble a few times).

Sanders’s campaign is a continuation of his 2016 race – since then his policy ideas, such as tuition free college and “Medicare for all” have become more popular and mainstream. Warren, like Bernie, is a non-establishment candidate, running on a variation of his ideas; she also has proven herself tough in these debates in the face of her opponents, corporations and the media – which is especially hard as a progressive candidate.

In the most recent debates, attention has caught onto Biden and his decline of mental cognition – from referring to people by the wrong name or title, to breaking into a random, incoherent lecture that avoids the debate question given to him. On top of that, he’s been criticized for taking credit for the positives of the Obama administration, but denying his involvement in its perceived negatives, such as mass deportations and deadly drone strikes in the Middle East.

One promising candidate who has gotten a big following is tech executive Andrew Yang, who is looking toward the future in his policy plans. He is proposing the UBI (universal basic income) or as he calls “the freedom dividend” – each person gets $1,000 a month to purchase whatever they please. The reason why is because technology advancement (AI, robots et al.) is going to take American jobs and so many overrun workers will have to rely on some sort of income to support themselves.

This policy position at face value sounds insane. But Yang is looking ahead to a future America we’ll have to prepare for. His involvement brings up an interesting dichotomy in the battle of ideas: Should candidates focus on issues that that we’ll have to think about in the far future? Or, should the focus be on defeating Donald Trump and all the policy decisions he’s put in place the last three years?

That answer is gonna be left up to a new generation of voters, as this election shapes up to be even more consequential than the last.