2020 In 20/20: A Look Back at the Upcoming Election
With the 2018 general election less than a month away, enough time has now passed to allow us to take an objective look forward to what will have gone wrong for the Democratic candidates in the 2020 election. The following is a clear-eyed pre-postmortem analysis of why the Democratic frontrunners failed to capture the public’s support, and thus the presidency, in 2020.
- Elizabeth Warren
The good-for-a-Democrat Warren has for years been an on again/off again favorite to win the Democratic nomination should she choose to run. In 2020, she finally will have announced her long anticipated candidacy. To many, Warren was thought to be a lock for the nomination as her appeal to the Democratic left base was embodied in her extreme far left politics: moderately progressive economically and unfathomably abysmal on foreign policy.
Things began to unravel for the Massachusetts Democrat when she decided to unveil the results of her 23andMe report. Warren was indeed up to 3% Native American, which in 2018 counted as a victory for Democrats. Bolstered for some reason by these results, Warren adopted a strategy of slowly revealing more information from her genetics analysis as part of a strategy to manipulate Trump into calling her an ever widening array of slurs, culminating in the baffling revelation that Warren was “as much as fifth generation Marxist.” This ended up backfiring as each new slur caused Trump’s approval numbers to tick up another 1%.
2. Kamala Harris
A young, fresh face making waves in insider circles, Kamala Harris checked nearly every box the party looks for in their ideal candidates. There are only two boxes, and being a career prosecutor covers half of them. Had she also been a troop, the primary would likely have been cancelled altogether.
Too bad for Harris that it wasn’t, as she’d ultimately end up locking away her chances and throwing away the key. At a pre-Super Tuesday rally in a popular Minneapolis pizza shop, Harris dazzled as she charmed voters and press in equal measure. Then came her fateful encounter with 14-year-old high school freshman Sheila Puckett, who shyly confessed that Harris inspired her to “work harder in school.”
At that, Harris’s face darkened as her prosecutor’s instincts kicked in. She interrogated a now-terrified Puckett on national news cameras, eventually coaxing the confession that the girl’s mother had taken her to the rally to meet Harris instead of to school. Harris had the mother imprisoned, with young Sheila vanishing into the state’s foster system. Voter reaction was mixed. Most agreed that while they love sending people to prison, they did not like to attach human faces to the families they destroyed.
3. Joe Biden
Joe Biden was the Democratic Party’s “break in case of emergency” candidate. The emergency was an ascendant Bernie Sanders and Biden was the firefighter’s ax meant to cut down this intra-party crisis by virtue of a) having once met Barack Obama, and b) not being Bernie Sanders. Loyal pundits were quick to pounce, highlighting the charismatic spring in the step of the youthful Biden (78 in 2020) contrasted with the cantankerous gripings of the wizened Sanders (79 in 2020).
The Joementum was not to last, however; the former vice president eventually derailing his own train. At a rally in support of renewing the Violence Against Women Act, Biden would be caught on an open mic admiring the many women who’d gathered for a photo op while whispering to special guests Jughead and Louis C.K., “VAWA? More like VAWAWOOOOOM!”
4. Bernie Sanders
Like Rocky after his first bout with Apollo, Bernie Sanders looked primed in 2020 for a historic climb to the top of the political trash heap. Early momentum was on his side and his poll numbers surged despite the best efforts of the DNC to make as clear as humanly possible that Sanders wasn’t anything like them.
Sanders would remain in the Democratic primary to the end, once again outlasting all but the eventual nominee. Pollsters and pundits have long debated what fueled Bernie’s late crash, with many now wondering if his campaign slogan, “Im the helldude,” failed to resonate with enough voters.
5. John McCain
Died.
6. Cory Booker
Booker expended considerable effort making at least superficial overtures toward the left in anticipation of his 2020 run, which is why it was so perplexing to experts that he would drop everything to run off on some mad quest at the height of primary season. It all began during a Senate climate change hearing when a testifying environmental scientist used the phrase, “the world is literally on fire.”
Not one to miss a photo op and remembering the PR boost brought on by his heroic dash into a burning building, Booker sprang into action. Before anyone knew what was happening, the New Jersey senator had disappeared with Elon Musk in the latter’s Jules Vernesque earth-burrower into the very bowels of the earth itself. According to campaign chief Robbie Mook, Booker’s last words to him were, “the world is on fire. We need to put politics aside and save who we can from inside the earth. Imagine how good this is gonna play in the Southwest.”
Mook considered mentioning to Booker the existence of shortcut tunnels, but then remembered that they were beneath Michigan.
7. Gritty
The surprise insurgent candidate of 2020 took the election by storm, riding an early Iowa power play to big wins in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Gritty proved unstoppable against his Democratic primary opponents, his clarion call for unified action against the spread of fascism resonating with wide swathes of voters.
Everything was looking up for the general election, with new and formerly non-voters lining up behind the unorthodox candidate in historic numbers. As in all things, it would be the party itself that would cost the Democrats another championship run. With Gritty poised to usher in a new era of left-leaning policy, the Democratic establishment drew the line when their candidate officially came out in support of raising the top tax brackets to 1970s levels.
The DNC and all primary opponents save Sanders released a unified statement in support of Republican incumbent Donald Trump. Introducing the decision in a live primetime announcement, Senate Minority Leader in Perpetuum Chuck Schumer stated, “better to go with the terrifying orange monster you know than the one you don’t.”
The reinvigorated #Resistance rallied to their leaders’ call for bipartisan unity, joining with the right to usher in Republican supermajorities in both houses and agreeing to crown Trump king to stave off any possibility of a candidate like Gritty or, worse, Bernie Sanders ever again threatening to rise.
