With Julian Castro officially out of the 2020 race and Cory Booker likely soon to follow suit, the Democratic Party must face a bleak, precarious reality: the party it has marketed (the party of diversity, inclusion, and wokeness) is not the party represented by its top presidential candidates.
What began as the most diverse Democratic primary field is dominated once again by older, white candidates. Castro, the only Latino in the race, announced he was ending his campaign early Thursday, and Kamala Harris, one of the race’s black candidates, dropped out in December. Cory Booker will undoubtedly follow suit soon since he failed to meet the qualifications for December’s primary debate, and unless he magically surges, will miss January’s, too. And, try as she might, Elizabeth Warren does not qualify as a racial minority.
Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard are still in the race, but the top contenders are Joe Biden (white male), Bernie Sanders (Jewish white male), Warren (white woman), and Pete Buttigieg (gay white male). Clearly, the bulk of Democratic voters care little, if at all, about their favorite candidate’s ethnicity, which is how it should be. Warren’s minuscule ties to the Cherokee community, or the lack thereof, do not make her better qualified for the presidency. What matters are her policies, and those should be enough to convince voters one way or the other.
But many of the left-leaning ideologues online do care a great deal about diversity — or at least, the appearance of it. But the Democratic Party’s failure to live up to its ideal has less to do with the party and more to do with the honest, well-meaning choices the Democratic voters have made.
Castro’s campaign didn’t fail because he was Latino, or because the Democratic Party didn’t do enough to include him; it failed because the voters didn’t like him, so they did not choose him.
Indeed, Biden was the leading candidate among Latino voters in a September poll, with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren outpacing Biden in a poll released last week. Castro didn’t even make the top five.
Similarly, Biden’s support among black voters is significantly higher than any of the other Democratic candidates. Should these voters be faulted for supporting him over Harris or Booker? You might think so, given some of the things the online Left has said.
They’ll never directly blame the electorate, of course. That would be foolish. Instead, they point the finger at the billionaires.
The lack of diversity among Democratic presidential contenders is a problem the Democratic Party has created for itself, and now it must figure out how to fix it — if it even can be fixed. The party’s base is clearly moving in a different direction, and whether that can be reconciled with the Democratic Party’s progressive appeal is something it must decide in the coming months.
