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What Makes a Successful Democratic Presidential Candidate?
What qualities a Democrat must possess in order to succeed in defeating Donald Trump.
With a deeper and ever growing divide between the corporate and people driven wings of the Democratic Party, there is of course a difference of opinion in matters of electoral strategy. The contrast has grown so polarized that the 2018 saw the beginning of a grass roots movement to take over the Democratic Party, that for the most part encompassed a wide array of women, people of color, and young people. If nothing else, it served as a clear indication that the country is heading towards a clear cultural shift.
The centrists in response will find it difficult to deny that they are trying desperately to toe the line between the old and the new, something that was not occurring even just three years ago. It speaks to the intensity and the force of the new grassroots movement that centrists are now at least pretending to be in favor of something like Medicare for All, which just a few years ago was something that Hillary Clinton said we did not have time for. Above all else however, this ideological divide in the wake of Donald Trump in particular has sparked an intense debate on how best to actually see democrats get elected. For the purposes of the argument, I’ll leave out the names of our Party nominee hopefuls.
The heart of the debate lies with the candidates themselves and which type of individual will play out the best with the electorate. The more conservative wing of the party feels that the ideal candidate must be someone who is able to “reach across the isle to work together”, which is a feat that I would argue is no longer possible in today’s polarized political climate. You simply cannot appeal to the modern right and the left at the same time running as a centrist, and the election of 2016 was the unfortunate proof.
So let’s lay out an alternative.
We need a candidate who above all else, as cliche as it may sound, has the ability to draw confidence from their base.
If the base, which is composed of more and more millennials and Gen Z voters with each passing day, will not vote for someone they cannot trust. The left did not lose the people who voted…
