The mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton radically shifted the 2020 dynamic to a test of character and values: “It is about who we are as a people and who we are going forward”
The first seven months of the contest for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination has produced a wealth of noise and numbers. More than $272 million has been raised by 23 declared candidates.has endured more than 40,000 selfies. There have been too many polls to count. What all that time and money and analysis has not produced is a clear sense of who the eventual nominee will be—largely because the discussion has so far dwelled mostly on prosaic policy.
“If this primary is about choosing a linear set of solutions to conventional problems, there are strong candidates. But I think it’s going to be about something larger,” says’s winning runs. “It is about who we are as a people and who we are going forward.”an immediate spotlight. The two candidates are Texans; O’Rourke grew up in El Paso; Castro is the only Latino-American in the field; and both men have been strenuous, eloquent supporters of the rights of immigrants.
One reason that the aftermath of the shootings is taking on such heightened political significance is that the campaign to date has left voters undecided and underwhelmed. The first batch of just-concluded nationally televised debates, for instance, were supposed to be turning point in the competition. Instead, 10 hours of talk produced just one consensus prediction: We are in for a slog that will last into the spring of 2020, at least until Super Tuesday, on March 3, and perhaps beyond.
Yet differences about marginal tax rates and carbon capture are not what will ultimately sift the pack into finalists and also-rans. “People tell pollsters that a candidate who can beat Trump is what’s most important, but that’s not what this race is really about right now,” Belcher says. “In 2008, Obama was never the best candidate to win in November for the Democrats. It was alwaysBut it’s never that rational. You have to have energy and a certain sort of magic.
Belcher said all of that on Friday afternoon. Two days later, after the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, he refined and extended the point, with heavy sadness in his voice. Unlike the massacres in Sandy Hook, or Las Vegas, or Parkland, the new murders took place just as a presidential campaign is heating up, and against the backdrop of an incumbent who has spent three years stoking fear and hatred.
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