2020 Election Update

By Eva Lynch

As the 2020 election draws ever nearer, Democrats and Republicans scramble to adapt to the new conditions of what promises to be the most tensely consequential election to date. 

This week, Democrats seemed to finally achieve their goal of presenting a united front against the incumbent President Trump, a goal which has eluded the party through a series of tense debates centering more on intra-party divides than the task at hand. As Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race earlier this week and was recently joined by former president Barack Obama in endorsing former vice president Joe Biden, DNC Chairman Tom Perez reports no doubt of Democrats rallying behind Biden, almost surely the Democratic nominee. Now, the question revolves around his running mate, which many experts believe will be former candidate Senator Kamala Harris, in order to resonate with young progressives and solidify the black voting block. 

However, the looming question of the capacity in which the 2020 general election will function still remains, especially as thousands of voters in Wisconsin flocked to cast their primary votes. The rest of the country looked on in horror as the gathering, in which many voters even opted out of wearing protective masks, grew against the repeated advice of social distancing from medical professionals worldwide. 

With the election so close, everything is politically significant in one way or another, and Democrats took the unfortunate gathering in Wisconsin as a chance to slam Republicans’ refusal to adopt mass vote-by-mail options. Many Republican leaders have expressed hesitation to universalize vote-by-mail measures because the preliminary stages of these efforts have harmed Republicans’ chances by accessibilizing voting even more ubiquitously than in the past when the same restrictions have not been necessary. Despite the controversial voting measures and this sentiment among Republicans, the defeat of incumbent and Trump-backed conservative Justice Daniel Kelly by liberal Judge Jill Karofsky for state Supreme Court has stimulated much hope in Democrats across the nation. 

Marc Elias, a representative of the DNC, said of the Wisconsin voting debacle, “Think about what they were willing to do for an election for a Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Then ask yourself, what would they be willing to do in November?”