During a fierce election season, America’s democrats must pick the candidate that they think is the best fit to go up against Donald Trump in 2020. The process of determining the democratic presidential candidate involves a series of media-run debates. For a candidate to qualify for the democratic debates they must have the support of 2 percent or greater in four or more polls and demonstrate that their campaign has received donations from at least 120,000 donors (a minimum of 200 donors per state).

Ten candidates qualified for the past Sept. 12 debate in Houston, Texas and the upcoming Oct. 15 debate in Westerville, Ohio: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Andrew Yang, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro and Amy Klobuchar. Tulsi Gabbard, has recently met the qualifications for the Oct. 15 debate as well. Polls are showing that Biden, Warren and Sanders are most likely to move on to the fourth debate, and it is now looking “like a three horse race” for which candidate will ultimately get chosen to move on to the main election.

Certain candidates have plans for what they hope to bring to our nation. For instance, Biden, the current top-ranked candidate according to Business Insider, is bringing the idea of returning Obama’s legacy to the debate floor, having served as his vice president.

Warren, the current second-ranked candidate, gets straight to the point about her goals for the country: she said “I don’t understand why anyone goes through the trouble of running for President of the United States to just talk about what we can’t do and what we shouldn’t fight for.” Her message is resonating around the country and she is quickly gaining support.

Many people have their own opinions about the debates; this includes not only who they support, but also how efficient having many candidates run is. Some believe that having more candidates running for the election ends up causing inefficiency. Nathan Long, ‘20, said that he feels “many of the smaller candidates have great ideas but don’t have the charisma or media backing to win in the upcoming election. “With so many candidates, so many voters don’t want to research all of them,” Long said. This potentially could end up having uneducated voters voting for who they think is best, or who someone tells them is best, rather than having their own opinion.

Many voters and media outlets only pay attention to the front-runners without considering the ideas that the other candidates might bring to the table, and this ends up shunting ideas from many of the lesser-known candidates.
“The debates should be a tool for the American public to get informed about each of the candidates so they can choose for themselves who is nominated,” Long said. Long prefers both Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang because “they have proposed methods of paying for these which wouldn’t further burden American checkbooks like many of the front-runner candidates would.”

Some are also worried about how having such a multitude of candidates may end up causing division rather than a unification of the democratic party in addition to the inefficiency. In an election, it is essential that a party remains united rather than divided. History teacher Adam Lazar states that the idea of so many candidates running “was a circus,” also adding that while he thinks the party has some time, they “do not have a strong enough candidate to beat [Trump].”

Despite divisions or inefficiency, one of these candidates will end up being in the running for the President of the United States, and the results of the primary elections will end up affecting America as a whole.