What the Democratic Party Now Needs: Unity

If there was an underlying theme to last week’s Republican National Convention, it was certainly unity. Just days after former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there were numerous calls for unity at the RNC. And it wasn’t just unity within the Republican Party that people were calling for, it was unity within the country that Trump and his allies tried to evoke, or at least claimed to be seeking. While Trump said that he was running to be president “for all of America, not half of America,” during his acceptance speech on Thursday, he abandoned the conciliatory tone in the second half of his address, where he reverted to his well-known, rather divisive rhetoric about Biden’s track record, illegal immigrants and the allegedly stolen 2020 election. One thing became clear though, and that is the fact that the Republican Party has rallied around Trump, whose chances of returning to the White House have rarely looked better.

Unity is something the Democratic quickly needs to find in the aftermath of President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race and endorse his current vice president, Kamala Harris. Given the short time that is available until the Democratic National Convention that will take place in Chicago from August 19-22, uniting the party behind a candidate quickly seems crucial in order to run a campaign that can ultimately win the presidency in November. Holding a “mini-primary” ahead of the DNC, which is the preferred option of some within the party, seems like a risk at this point because it would a) display a lack of unity within the party and b) put even more time pressure on whoever emerges as the eventual nominee to set up and run a successful presidential campaign.

As a recent survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of The Economist shows, Americans have already been seeing a lack of unity within the Democratic Party in recent weeks. Just 23 percent of respondents across party lines said that the party was very or somewhat united, while 61 percent stated that the party was very or somewhat divided. Even the majority of Democrats see division within their party, while the opposite is true of the Republican Party. 63 percent of Republicans said that their party was currently very or somewhat united, while just 29 percent saw the party as divided. Among all respondents, 47 percent saw the Republican Party as united, versus 35 percent who said it was divided.