Now that both Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) have dropped out of the 2020 presidential race, the Democratic Party has no frontrunners who are people of color, given that tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang has yet to meet the polling threshold for Tuesday’s DNC debate.
“It’s with a full heart that I share this news — I’ve made the decision to suspend my campaign for president,” Booker told his supporters in an email on Monday.
Since Cory Booker’s announcement, liberals have been lamenting the dominance of white people in the 2020 race while conservatives have been trolling Democrats for claiming to be the party of diversity while two old white males remain the frontrunners.
“Cory Booker announced his campaign to be President is over and it got me thinking about Democrat hypocrisy. Out of the top 4 Republican candidates in 2016, 3 were minorities (1 black, 2 Hispanic). The Democrats top 4 are all white. Not quite the diverse party they claim to be!” tweeted Robby Starbuck.
“Cory Booker has dropped out of the 2020 race They claim the Republican Party is the party of ‘old, white men.’ Yet they’ve rejected every serious minority candidate thus far What happened to diversity being their ‘strength?'” tweeted TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk.
“First, Kamala. Now, you? Why did the Democrats kick out their black candidates? So much for ‘black lives matter,'” tweeted The Persistence.
“The progressive [Dems] continue to show their true colors – by eliminating people of color in their Presidential candidate process — Spartacus [Cory Booker] drops out leaving old white folks in the lead of the Dem’s selection process,” tweeted author Tony Shaffer.
“So the last of the Barack Obama 2.0 candidates has finally conceded the OBVIOUS. The old benign neglect strategy is DEAD. Ignore the Black vote and there is NO PATH to the White House. Not anymore,” tweeted Black Authority.
“Oh, no. That stinks. And [Tom Perez] has some serious thinking to do about his primary rules. This isn’t working. Our Democratic Party should NOT be represented by only white people,” said one Twitter user.
Reactions to Cory Booker’s exit mirrored the responses to Kamala Harris’ exit from the race late last year as Democrats began to fear that party had regressed back into white dominance.
“Kamala Harris officially ended her campaign today, which means that all of the candidates who currently qualify for the December Democratic debate are white (Sanders, Warren, Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Steyer). White supremacy is not just a Fox News problem, folks,” tweeted journalist Lauren Duca at the time.
“Obviously I’m no centrist but it’s downright effed up that smart, compelling, *very* experienced, centrist Democratic candidates of color are floundering while a smart but wildly inexperienced, centrist white mayor of teeny tiny city is surging. Bad look, Democrats,” tweeted LGBT activist Sally Kohn.
As political commentator Dave Rubin pointed out at the time of Kamala’s departure, Democrats crying racism have only to look in the mirror considering that the Republicans they routinely tar and feather as bigoted racists do not vote in the primary.
“Do they realize this was a Democratic primary,” Rubin wondered aloud at the time.