Arizona May Cut Candidate List

Photo Courtesy / Flickr Chairman Kelli Ward discusses how Arizona might reduce candidates to her audience.

Kelsey Walters

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Contributing Writer 

On Sept. 9, Arizona Republicans announced that they were going to drop their 2020 presidential candidates along with three other states in hopes of helping the push of President Trump’s reelection.

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According to CBS News, candidates going against Trump from Nevada, South Carolina, and Kansas have decided to skip the primaries in an attempt to shorten the competition.

CBS News quoted Chairman Kelli Ward in a statement saying, “Arizona Republicans are fired up to re-elect President Trump to a second term and will continue to work together to ‘keep America and Arizona great.’”

According to The Hill, Trump’s campaign has been working with several state Republican parties to possibly hold back a primary challenger and to install pro-Trump leaders in state party roles.

So, what does this mean for the future election in the long run?

It decreases the number of Republican candidates that are going against the president in the 2020 election, focusing the votes of those who vote for the republican towards him.

In theory, for some situations, this would be a great idea.

Get rid of or make deals with the competition and you have a better chance of making it to the top, but within a country that thrives on “people’s choice,” it’s dangerous.

The point of our voting system and our government system as a whole, a democracy, is that the people have the ability to vote and have the ability to choose who they want to support our nation as a whole.

And not to say this hasn’t been done before, according to the Hill, both in 2016 and in 1996 Arizona pulled their Democratic party candidates out of primaries for both the Obama election and the Clinton election.

In the case of this election, there are more than just one or two states taking their candidates out, there are currently four that have decided to do so.

The problem with this course of action is the feeling of being slightly pushed to vote for one person rather than voting to who you really want to represent you and your country.

Cutting the number of people running for election in a certain party, it backs certain people into a corner and causes those who strictly vote Republican or strictly Democrat to have a limited choice to who their voting for.

If someone in Arizona only strictly votes Republican, and they were hoping to vote for a president from their state, they’re being taken away that option and are being forced to settle on someone rather than be completely happy with who their voting with.

This issue could get complicated.

What’s stopping everyone from completely taking out all of the Republican primary candidates?

Is there anything stopping them from doing so?

The situation just seems to be a bit too sketchy in my personal opinion, and it seems way too convenient for the current situation as well.

It almost seems as though they’re trying to slowly limit the number of Republican candidates to the point where Trump would be the only “reasonable” candidate in their eyes, and that in itself could cause a snowball effect in not only the election itself but the way we all look at democracy.

Email Kelsey at:

ewalters@live.esu.edu