By Jack Levy, Staff Writer
The 2024 Presidential Election is less than one year away and America as a whole will need to decide which candidate will steer the country in a better direction.
The last presidential election in 2020 was one of the most divisive elections in recent history, and the results were contested by former President Donald Trump.
For the Republican party, the last few months saw candidates campaigning in different states and three televised debates were held. Trump refused to take part in these debates. During the first debate, Trump did an interview with media pundit Tucker Carlson to rival the viewership of the debate.
The candidates on stage for the first primary debate included Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Former Vice President Mike Pence, Former UN Ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
As it stands right now, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination is Trump. Haley is the last contender to Trump within his own party, as all of the other candidates have withdrawn their campaigns.
The last candidate to withdraw from the race was Gov. DeSantis after Trump decisively won the Iowa Caucus last month.
For the Democratic party, President Joe Biden is the frontrunner, though he is currently challenged by Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota and author Marianne Williamson.
The independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also performing unprecedentedly well for an independent candidate. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, Kennedy has the support of 20 percent of voters.
“I like RFK a lot,” senior computer science major Gus Ciaccio said. “I like him and his message the best out of the three. I feel like it would be a waste of a vote though, if I voted for him because third-party candidates never win.”
However, in all likelihood, the next president will be either Biden or Trump.
Both major party candidates are deep in multiple scandals which will undoubtedly be brought up when the two candidates take the debate stage.
Trump recently was ordered to pay author E. Jean Carroll $83 million for defamation. This result came after Trump was ordered to pay $5 million to her last year after a jury found him guilty of sexual abuse and defamation in a civil trial.
Trump is also currently on trial or will be on trial for mishandling classified documents, civil fraud and attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
Biden is not currently on trial for anything, though he has been heavily criticized for his handling of world affairs – namely the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, his handling of the wars in Ukraine and Israel and his handling of the border crisis.
Biden’s handling of the economy is also unpopular. According to an NBC national poll, Trump has a 22-point lead among voters when asked who would better handle the economy.
The Department of Justice also recently confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop and its contents, which Biden and numerous intelligence officials previously denied and called a Russian disinformation campaign.
Despite these scandals, one of these candidates will be the next president unless something changes drastically between now and November.
“We always talk about how we want change in this country, but we’re going to have the same two unpopular candidates that we had last time,” junior finance major Jake Shaw said. “Whatever the outcome is, I think the country is going to be totally divided even worse than it is now. These candidates don’t bring people together and we’ve had almost ten years of half the country being at odds with the other half. Both sides are guilty.”
There is still time before the election and the nominations are not set in stone yet. However, whoever the winner is will be tasked with fixing the economy, handling volatile wars and humanitarian crises around the world and unifying the divided country.
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