After an impassioned run, fueled by the idea of what could have been if the Democratic Party had chosen a different candidate in 2016, Bernie Sanders withdrew from the 2020 presidential race. The withdrawal of Sanders clears the way for a general election between, presumptive, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.

In a live-streamed speech, Sanders cast his decision in the broader context of the coronavirus. The candidate stated that the resources used to fuel his campaign would be better utilized in the national effort to remediate the impacts of the, still spreading, pandemic. 

“I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour,” Sanders said, adding, “While this campaign is coming to an end, our movement is not.”

The Vermont senator, a democratic socialist, based his 2020 campaign on issues including a single-payer national health insurance platform – a.k.a. Medicare for All – and large-scale national energy sector reform. 

Sanders has been serving in the U.S. Senate since 2007 and, to date, has 100 percent approval ratings from Human Rights Campaign, League of Conservation Voters and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. While Sanders will not be a candidate in this year’s general election, these endorsements – and the liberal policies he proposed – made him a favorite amongst youth voters. 

Biden, the former vice president, can now pursue the Democratic nomination unopposed. However, he has struggled to present any distinct policy plans and, perhaps consequently, is still facing obstacles in regards to mobilizing a broad base of voters for the November election. 

Since Sanders left the race on April 8, reports have emerged that the Biden campaign has sought policy advice from the Vermont native’s team. This may symbolize a, somewhat unexpected, shift to the political left for the traditionally moderate Democrat. 

“I’ll be reaching out to you,’’ Biden wrote in a statement acknowledging the need to draw Sander’s base into his coalition. “You will be heard by me.”

“Together we will defeat Donald Trump. And when we do that, we’ll not only do the hard work of rebuilding this nation — we’ll transform it,” said Biden.

Still, many are skeptical of the candidate. Key criticisms against Biden include eight separate allegations of inappropriate touching, his support of the Hyde amendment which would ban federal funding for most abortions and a public statement made in 2008 where Biden called for a fence to be built along the U.S.’s southern border. 

Despite this, the list of public figures who have endorsed Biden is extensive and growing by the day. Prominent endorsements have come from former President Obama and Democratic senators who were previously in the 2020 Presidential race, including Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. 

Though the campaign cycle has been impacted by the coronavirus spread, it is expected that Biden will be named as the official Democratic nominee at the rescheduled convention during the week of Aug. 17, 2020.

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) greeted one another March 16 by bumping elbows, setting the mood for a debate that would be dominated by talk of proposed COVID-19 response plans.  

The debate was hosted by CNN in a D.C. television studio – the first to be conducted without a live audience since the Kennedy-Nixon debates of the 1960s. Though the lack of audience was mandated by grim circumstances, the change was much welcomed – I was more than happy to be spared the 30 seconds of audience whooping and applause after a candidate rattled off a well-rehearsed zinger intricately crafted by their campaign team. In addition, the setting made the debate feel a bit more authentic, substance-focused and certainly more coherent. 

Barring the mobbish influence of the audience and perhaps adding the sobering effect of the pandemic, both candidates seemed substantially less aggressive, and at several key points, allied together in their remarks about their responses to COVID-19. Still, as passionately as Biden and Sanders agree that Trump is mishandling the COVID-19 response, at their core, the candidates’ ideological centers are as far apart as their socially distanced lecterns were on the debate stage.

Sanders, expectedly zeroed in on the implications the coronavirus crisis has on the public health and economic sphere, using the pandemic as another arguing point for a single-payer healthcare system. Admittedly, this crisis, probably more than any purely theoretical economic or social reasoning Sanders could have provided, is probably the most convincing vehicle by which Sanders could turn skeptical Americans in favor of a universal healthcare system. 

At a time when a health crisis is personally affecting every American, this is a crucial moment – one in which Sanders has the greatest chance of rallying the national solidarity required to convince more Democratic voters of supporting his proposed single-payer system.

Still, the question remains: How can Sanders so emphatically turn to single-payer healthcare as a solution to a pandemic like this when nations that already had strongly rooted universal healthcare systems – Italy, Spain and the UK – failed to adequately combat the virus?

Though it may be easy to point to the United States’ number one spot on the list of countries with the most confirmed COVID-19 cases as being an indicator that the U.S. healthcare system has left it vulnerable to coronavirus, several contextual factors have to be taken into account. Most importantly, Sanders has not yet accounted for the disparity in fatality rates between the United States and nations with single-payer healthcare systems. With the U.S. fatality rate due to coronavirus at three percent and the UK, Spain and Italy fatality rate rising above 10 percent, Sanders has to find new ways to market his single-payer system to voters who may begin viewing it as a weaker system.

Biden capitalized on this question, turning it around on Sanders and emphasizing that people are “looking for results, not a revolution.” Still, as much as Biden may be promising results, he fails to lay out a distinct and novel policy plan in response to the pandemic. 

Using rhetoric that likens the pandemic to a war, Biden appears to be grasping desperately for some sort of “rally-round-the-flag effect,” aiming to unite all Democrats with him to fight against the lethal foe that is the coronavirus. In the context of the televised debate, Biden may as well have started howling “We’re All in This Together” from “High School Musical” in his pandering attempt to centralize deeply ideologically split Democratic voters behind his campaign.  

However, there is a reasonable underpinning to Biden’s geezerly attempt at pushing partisan unity. Let me point to the striking similarities between both Biden and Sanders’ coronavirus response plans as laid out on their websites:

• Elimination of cost barriers to COVID-19 related testing, preventive care and treatment
• Swift, decisive economic response entailing paid emergency leave for workers and families affected by the pandemic
• Acceleration of COVID-19 vaccine development
• Expansion of Medicaid and Medicare to ensure health coverage for vulnerable people

Though there are certainly notable differences in the candidates’ response plans, Biden and Sanders both prioritize access to quality healthcare for all Americans, balanced with a careful and pragmatic approach to economic impacts of the pandemic – a contrast to Trump’s over-eager and apparently haphazard economy-focused approach.

In all bleak honesty, Sanders chose the most beneficial course of action for the Democratic Party in countering the coronavirus by withdrawing from the race and allowing Biden and his team to apply laser-focus to efforts against coronavirus. I commend Sanders for recognizing that he stood too low of a chance of clinching the nomination to justify carrying his campaign into the late months of the summer, as the coronavirus-sourced delays of state primaries would necessitate. 

In less biased terms, Biden’s assertion that voters want either revolution or moderate pragmatism is true. The Democratic Party as it stands is polarized to an unprecedented extent. As the frontrunner, if Biden has any hope of beating Trump, he must increasingly cater to progressives. And, as a seasoned career politician, Biden and his team likely realize this too.

Though I understand that Sanders and his team felt a reinvigorated urgency to push his healthcare plan in light of the worst public health crisis in the last century, the odds were stacked against his campaign, and prolonging it into the late summer months would have seriously hurt the Democratic Party as it prepares to reclaim the executive seat. Though his second race for the Democratic nomination came to yet another disappointing end,, Sanders can rest easy knowing his influence will pull Biden leftward as he seeks to garner all the support he can in defeating Trump. 

Sanders argued that access to health care should be guaranteed as a right. He regretted that the U.S. is the only developed country that does not assure near-universal health care coverage. This assertion has been verified by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Cruz argued that an individual’s right to health care should mean the right for the individual to choose the health care to which he or she has access; the ACA diminishes the individual’s freedom to choose. He cited that 6 million Americans had their plans canceled contrary to their wishes and that many lost their ability to see their primary care physicians with the new ACA stipulations, and that the average household insurance premiums rose by around $5,000—a reflection of decreased competition in the health insurance market and the fact that insurance companies raised rates to compensate for more risk in the expanded insurance market. Cruz also cited the long wait times and subsequent tragedies that occur in high-income countries with state-controlled coverage; when government rations health care, hospitals become overburdened and less effective he asserted.

“In America, we do rationing in a different way, Ted,” replied Sanders. He alluded to the tens of thousands of Americans who die because they do not see a doctor when they should, due to a lack of affordable insurance.

While Cruz argued that having access to health care means maintaining the right to choose that health care, Sanders asked, “You want to buy one of Donald Trump’s mansions?” He asserted that per Cruz’s definition, “You have access to do that as well,” said Sanders. “Access doesn’t mean a damn thing”—especially for working class Americans.

As for a U.S. without the ACA, Cruz assured a woman from the audience who was battling breast cancer that her policy would not be canceled because of her preexisting condition. Yet, Cruz did not answer if or how an ACA replacement would mandate that insurance companies ignore preexisting conditions for future policies.

Both Sanders and Cruz mentioned that doctors seem to spend more time filling out forms than they do practicing medicine. Cruz argued this is due to ACA forms; Sanders claimed that this drain on doctors’ time comes from insurance companies, further supporting his end goal of booting insurance companies out of health care and joining the rest of the developed world with a single-payer health care system.

Cruz implored Sanders to join him in a fight to curtail the power of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry and the Federal Drug Administration (FDA).

“Right now, it takes 2 billion dollars to approve a new drug,” Cruz said. “I’ve written legislation to reform the process so we can be curing diseases and curing people.”

Expenses driven by the FDA dissuade drug developers from bringing life-saving drugs to the market and FDA regulations bar international drugs from entering the U.S. market, he asserted. Though disagreeing on the normative power of the FDA, both senators agreed that less-expensive drugs should be imported from abroad.

Cruz did not adequately answer how his alternative to the ACA would expand access to health care for individuals with preexisting conditions while increasing competition and empowering patients; Sanders failed to answer how businesses are expected to shoulder mandated insurance without raising prices or cutting wages. However, this health care conversation is far from over, and these two senators specifically, who are both prospective 2020 presidential candidates, are not through debating.

Steinem, who became notable within the feminist movement in the 1960s and 70s, went on Bill Maher’s talk show to discuss her support of Clinton. When asked by Maher about why she thought more women seemed to be drawn towards Bernie Sanders’s campaign, Steinem responded that female Sanders’s supporters were there to attract the attention of young men.

“When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,’” said Steinem.

After Internet backlash, Steinem issued a statement regarding what she said on Maher’s talk show. She emphasized that she was not trying to assert that women are not involved in politics.

In a similar controversy, Albright recently took the stage at a Clinton rally and encouraged the women in the audience to examine their political leanings. She blatantly said that it was every woman’s duty to support Clinton in her presidential run, ending the short speech with a now famous quote.

“There is a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women,” Albright said.

Both women have received negative responses for their comments about the role of women in politics. Steinem’s comments seem supportive of the gendered expectation that women are not as involved in politics as men. Statements like this keep the conversation about women centered on how women are perceived to be shallow and uninterested. She issued a statement through Facebook in which she attempted to explain the actual meaning behind her quote.

This exchange brings to light the faults within the current political landscape and how women are viewed through the mass media lens. Politics, specifically presidential elections, have always focused mainly on men. Women have been seen as accessories for campaigning. Wives are shown off at campaign rallies and in television advertisements.

Albright’s opening speech for Clinton raises another important issue. She has been called a feminist icon, but she put forth a non-feminist ideal. Feminism is not simply about supporting women. Feminism is about equal rights for all sexes and not shaming women for making conscious decisions about how they want to lead their lives. There is absolutely no reason to shame women who do not support Clinton. It is no woman’s duty to support a woman simply because she is a woman. It is a woman’s duty as a citizen search for the most-qualified candidate and to make an informed decision based on the available information.

During Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, the media was notorious for focusing solely on Clinton’s appearance and clothing choices. She was once reported to look “tired and withdrawn” when she decided not to wear make up on a trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Attention like this has not only affected Clinton, but also Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. The media is the main source of sexist remarks regarding the appearance of women on the political stage, especially when this attention is not paid to men. It becomes even more obvious when a candidate such as Clinton comes into the spotlight of the presidential election.